Susan Denberg: The Hammer Venus Frankenstein Created, Star Trek's Magda and Playboy's Miss August 1966

Susan Denberg burned across the screen for barely two years, and yet her image has never left the late-night corners of cinema memory. A platinum blonde stretched on Baron Frankenstein's laboratory table. A sequined bride stepping off a starship in a cloud of synthetic glamour. A centerfold folded into the August 1966 issue of Playboy. Three pictures, one woman, and almost no voice of her own.

This is the story of how a girl from Pomerania and Carinthia became one of the most photographed faces of the swinging sixties, and how that same photography may have opened every door for her before quietly closing them all.

She belongs in our Mistresses of Hammer series beside Valerie Leon, Ingrid Pitt and Hazel Court. But her case is different. Theirs were careers. Hers was a flash.

Meeting Susan Denberg: From Pomerania to the Bluebell Line

Before there was Susan Denberg, there was Dietlinde Zechner.

She was born on 2 August 1944 in Bad Polzin, a spa town in Pomerania that was then part of Germany and is now Połczyn-Zdrój in Poland. Think about the date for a moment. The war was in its final, desperate year. Within months, that whole region would change hands and change names, and families like hers would move west with whatever they could carry.

When she was one year old, the Zechners settled in Klagenfurt, the lakeside capital of Carinthia in southern Austria. That is where she grew up. Mountains, a cold green lake, church bells and the quiet discipline of a small Austrian city in the rebuilding years. Nothing in that landscape suggested Hollywood, starships or a mad scientist's slab.

So already, at the very beginning, she carried a double identity. Born German, raised Austrian. Born in a town that no longer exists under that name. Later, Hollywood would simplify all of it into one easy label: the exotic European blonde. But the real woman came from a border, a displacement and a childhood spent far from any spotlight.

London at Eighteen

At eighteen, she left Klagenfurt for London.

She went the way many young European women did in the early sixties, as an au pair, minding other people's children in exchange for a room and the chance to learn English. It was a respectable ticket out of a small town, and London in 1962 was exactly the right city to land in. The capital was waking up. Carnaby Street, beat music, short skirts and photographers looking for new faces.

Dietlinde had the kind of face they were looking for. Tall, at about five foot seven, with strong cheekbones and pale hair, she soon left the nursery behind for the stage. She joined the Bluebell Girls, the famous troupe of tall dancers created by Margaret Kelly, whose precision lines of feathers, sequins and long legs played the great cabarets of Europe.

Picture her there. Under hot stage lights, in a row of identical silhouettes, each girl a matched piece of a living chandelier. It was glamorous work, and it was also anonymous work. A Bluebell was meant to be beautiful and interchangeable. In a sense, her whole career would echo that first job: admired for the shape she made in the light, rarely asked who she was.

Las Vegas and a Hollywood Husband

The chorus line took her to Las Vegas, where the Bluebells and their imitators lit up the casino showrooms in the middle of the desert. Vegas in the mid-sixties was neon, cocktails and the promise that anyone pretty enough could be discovered between the second and third show.

There, in 1965, she married Tony Scotti, an American actor and singer who would later become a successful television producer and, years after their divorce, the husband of the French singer Sylvie Vartan. The marriage put her one step closer to Los Angeles and to the people who decide which faces end up on screen.

That same year she moved to Los Angeles, and things happened quickly. Very quickly. Within months she had a guest role in the war series 12 O'Clock High, playing Mitzi, a German girl. The casting was a small sign of what was coming. Hollywood heard her accent, saw her hair and placed her immediately in the box marked "foreign beauty."

The Shape of What Came Next

It is worth pausing here, before the centerfold and the starship and the Baron's laboratory, because this is the last moment when Dietlinde Zechner was still mostly herself.

She was twenty-one. She spoke English with a strong Austrian accent. She had no formal acting training, only stage discipline, ambition and a look that photographed beautifully. She had a husband in the business and no family nearby. And she was about to enter the most image-hungry machine of the decade at exactly the moment it was learning to sell women as pictures first and performers second.

In early 1966 she enrolled in an acting workshop at Desilu, the studio where a new science-fiction series was in production. One of its episodes needed three women whose beauty was literally the plot.

Her name, at that point, was still Dietlinde. It would not stay that way for long.

Mitzi, Ruta, Magda: The Exotic Blonde and Star Trek's Venus Drug

Read the names of Susan Denberg's characters in a row and a pattern appears before you even see a frame.

Mitzi. Maria. Ruta. Magda. Christina.

Every one of them is European, foreign or somehow imported. Every one of them is first described by how she looks. In just over a year, Hollywood wrote her the same part again and again, changing only the costume.

The Television Foreigner

Her earliest screen work was in television, the fastest-moving machine in 1960s Hollywood. In 12 O'Clock High, the ABC war drama about American bomber crews in England, she played Mitzi, a German girl, in the 1966 episode "Back to the Drawing Board." The same year she turned up as Maria in "My Island," an episode of The Wackiest Ship in the Army, a comedy-adventure set in the Pacific war.

These were small parts. A few scenes, a few lines, a glamorous presence in the corner of a story about men. But they show how casting directors read her. The accent that came from Klagenfurt translated, on screen, into a simple shorthand: she was the girl from somewhere else.

An American Dream and the German Maid

Her film debut came the same year, in An American Dream, a Warner Bros. adaptation of Norman Mailer's novel, directed by Robert Gist and starring Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh. In some markets it was retitled See You in Hell, Darling, which tells you how the studio chose to sell Mailer's dark, overheated story.

Denberg played Ruta, the German maid in the household of the hero's wealthy wife. In Mailer's book, Ruta is an erotic figure, a sensual presence who drifts through a night of violence and guilt. The film, censored and softened for 1966 screens, kept her mostly as atmosphere: a blonde in uniform, a glance across a luxurious room.

Critics were not kind to the picture. But for a young Austrian with no training, the credit mattered. A Warner Bros. feature beside Janet Leigh, six years after Psycho, was a real step. It also confirmed the type. Once again she was the European woman whose body carried the scene.

The Desilu Workshop and Three Brides

Early in 1966, Denberg was studying at an acting workshop at Desilu, the studio of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Desilu was then producing a new NBC series about a starship and its crew, still finding its feet before anyone imagined the empire it would become.

That workshop led to her casting in Star Trek. She filmed her scenes between 6 and 10 June 1966 on Desilu's Stages 9 and 10, for an episode called "Mudd's Women."

It was one of the earliest episodes made. Directed by Harvey Hart and written by Stephen Kandel, it introduced Harcourt Fenton Mudd, a cheerful space con man played by Roger C. Carmel. Mudd was ferrying three women across the galaxy to become wives for lonely lithium miners on a remote planet. Karen Steele played Eve McHuron. Maggie Thrett played Ruth Bonaventure. Susan Denberg played Magda Kovacs.

The episode aired on 13 October 1966, and it is still remembered for one striking image: three women walking onto the bridge of the Enterprise, wrapped in sparkling gowns, while every man in the room falls silent.

Every man except Spock, of course.

The Venus Drug

Here is the twist that makes "Mudd's Women" more than a parade of costumes. Their beauty is not real, or so the story claims. Mudd keeps the women supplied with an illegal substance called the Venus drug, which makes them irresistible. When the drug wears off, their glow fades and their insecurity returns.

In the end, Eve takes a pill that turns out to be a harmless placebo, and she is beautiful anyway. The lesson, in proper 1960s television fashion, is that confidence was the real magic all along.

For a site called Meeting Venus, the coincidence is almost too perfect. But watch the episode today with Denberg's life in mind, and it feels less like a coincidence and more like a prophecy.

Three women are transported by a smooth-talking man, presented to strangers as objects of desire and sold on the strength of their looks. Their value depends on an artificial glamour that someone else supplies. When the glamour fades, they are told they are worth nothing.

That is the plot of "Mudd's Women." It is also an uncomfortably close description of how the image industry treated many young actresses of that decade, and how it would soon treat Denberg herself.

Magda in the Light

Among the three brides, Magda is the quietest. Karen Steele's Eve carries most of the drama and the romance. Maggie Thrett's Ruth, dark-haired in emerald green, is the sultry one. Denberg's Magda, blonde and cool, has fewer lines and more close-ups.

And what close-ups they are. The early Star Trek cinematographers lit guest actresses with a soft, glowing filter, almost like a halo. On Magda, that glow catches the cheekbones, the pale hair, the slightly distant eyes. She seems to belong to another planet even before the script says so.

It is a beautiful image. It is also, once more, a role made mainly of light, fabric and silence.

Two months after she finished filming, a very different kind of camera would make her famous across America. And that camera did not care about lines at all.

Miss August 1966: The Centerfold, the Contest and the Vintage Lens

In the summer of 1966, Susan Denberg's face and figure travelled further in one month than they had in her entire career. The August issue of Playboy named her Playmate of the Month, and suddenly the Austrian dancer with a handful of television credits was folded into millions of American homes, barbershops, college dorms and army lockers.

It was the most powerful publicity machine of its time. The question this section asks is a simple one with a complicated answer: did it build her, or did it box her in?

The Girl Who Wanted to Act

Every Playmate feature came with a short profile, a few paragraphs mixing hobbies, tastes and ambitions. In hers, Denberg said she wanted to become an actress.

It is a modest sentence, and in hindsight a poignant one. She was not presenting herself as a model or a party girl. She was asking, politely, to be taken seriously in the profession she was already trying to enter. She had just finished shooting Star Trek. She had a Warner Bros. film behind her. The centerfold, in her eyes, may well have been a step toward the screen, not a destination.

The readers responded. She became one of the finalists for Playboy's 1967 Playmate of the Year, a title that went in the end to Lisa Baker. Being a finalist meant more photo sessions, more appearances and more attention.

The Vintage Lens

Look at the surviving glamour photography from 1966 and you see why the cameras loved her.

The style of the period was warm and theatrical: soft key light, a halo of backlight through teased blonde hair, satin sheets or fur throws, skin glowing as if lit from inside. Photographers posed women as sculptures, all curves and shadows, the face often turned in a half-smile toward something just out of frame. Denberg's height, her Bluebell posture and her strong Central European bone structure suited that aesthetic perfectly. In still images she looks completely at ease. Poised, unhurried, controlled.

Still images were her natural medium. They needed no voice, no accent and no dialogue. They only needed light and a face that could hold it.

The press photography of that year tells the same story. Agency pictures show her at publicity events in London in the summer of 1966. Captions from June 1966 describe her as about to star in a new film. In August, she was the special guest presenting prizes at a soapbox racing event at Alexandra Palace in London. A centerfold in America and a celebrity guest in England, all within weeks.

Fame had arrived. But it was the fame of a picture.

A Name Chosen by Contest

Even her name was part of the marketing.

While she was working on An American Dream, Warner Bros. ran a nationwide contest to find the young Dietlinde Zechner a new screen name, with a $500 prize for the best suggestion. The studio wanted something that American audiences could pronounce, remember and print on a poster.

Accounts differ on how it ended. At least one biographical source says she finally came up with "Susan Denberg" herself. Either way, the episode is revealing. A woman's own name was treated as a publicity problem to be solved by the public, and her identity as a product to be branded.

Dietlinde, the girl from Klagenfurt, became Susan, a name that sounded like a sweetheart from an American high school. Denberg kept a faint European echo. It was a perfect brand: familiar enough to sell, foreign enough to intrigue.

Built or Boxed In?

So did Playboy help her career?

In the short term, almost certainly yes. One review of Frankenstein Created Woman notes that Hammer recruited her directly after her appearance as a Playmate. For a newcomer with one film and a few TV episodes, the centerfold delivered instant recognition that years of small parts could not. It gave Hammer an easy marketing hook, and it gave her a lead role in her second film.

But look closer and the costs appear.

First, the centerfold made her famous as an image before she was known as a performer. Producers who had seen her in Playboy already knew what they wanted from her, and it was not range.

Second, it fixed her in a type. The European blonde of 12 O'Clock High and Star Trek was now the European blonde of a men's magazine. Every role that followed would ask her to be looked at.

Third, it added pressure without support. She was twenty-two, recently married, far from family, with no training and a strong accent. The glamour circuit of the sixties offered parties, attention and excess. It did not offer protection, and it certainly did not offer acting lessons.

In 1966, few people asked whether a centerfold could be a trap. Some actresses used Playboy as a springboard and kept rising. For others, the photographs stayed brighter than anything they were later allowed to do on screen.

For Susan Denberg, the next step would test exactly which kind of story hers would be. Hammer Films was waiting, and so was Baron Frankenstein.

Frankenstein Created Woman: A Body Without a Voice

Every Hammer fan knows the still. Peter Cushing's Baron Frankenstein bends over his laboratory table, calm and clinical, while Susan Denberg lies before him, unconscious, wrapped in bandages and pale light. It became one of the defining images of Hammer's glamour era, printed in books, posters and fan magazines for decades.

It is also, if you think about it, the perfect summary of her career. A beautiful woman lying still while a man decides what she will become.

And God, Then Frankenstein, Created Woman

The idea for the film was born almost ten years earlier. In 1958, while Hammer was making The Revenge of Frankenstein, Roger Vadim's And God Created Woman was the sensation of the moment. Brigitte Bardot, barefoot and sun-kissed, had redefined screen sensuality. Hammer, never shy about borrowing a headline, registered a working title: And Then Frankenstein Created Woman.

The project waited until production began in November 1966. By then, Hammer had found its own Bardot figure: an Austrian Playmate with a magazine-cover face and almost no acting experience.

The team around her was Hammer's finest. Terence Fisher, the studio's master of Gothic horror, directed. Anthony Hinds wrote the script under his pen name, John Elder. Anthony Nelson Keys produced. Arthur Grant handled the cinematography, Bernard Robinson designed the sets and James Bernard composed one of his most lyrical scores. Peter Cushing returned as the Baron for the fourth time, with Thorley Walters as his kindly, bumbling assistant, Dr Hertz.

The Story of Christina

Denberg plays Christina Kleve, the daughter of a village innkeeper. At the start of the film she is shy and fragile, with a disfigured face and a partly paralysed side, mocked by three cruel young dandies, Anton, Karl and Johann. Her only tenderness comes from Hans, the Baron's young assistant, played by Robert Morris.

When the three dandies kill Christina's father, Hans is wrongly blamed. He is tried and guillotined, refusing to reveal that he spent the night with Christina because it would ruin her name. Heartbroken, she drowns herself.

Frankenstein, who has been experimenting with capturing the human soul at the moment of death, sees an opportunity. He traps Hans's soul and transfers it into Christina's body, rebuilding her as a flawless blonde beauty. She wakes with no memory of who she was. But Hans's spirit is inside her, and it wants revenge. One by one, the beautiful Christina seduces and kills the men who destroyed them both.

The film was marketed with a lurid tagline promising a beautiful woman with the soul of the Devil. In fact, it is one of the most melancholy and poetic of all Hammer films. Instead of stitched corpses and electricity, it deals with the soul, identity and the relationship between body and mind. Many critics now rank it among Hammer's very best.

The Beauty Fisher Created

Fisher and Grant photograph the resurrected Christina like a fairy-tale apparition. Her pale hair frames her face. Her gowns are simple and luminous against the dark wood of the village and the stone of the laboratory. In the seduction scenes, she moves slowly, almost dreamily, a creature not quite of this world. Bernard's music gives her a haunting, romantic theme that follows her like perfume.

Denberg's stillness, which could look stiff in other roles, works beautifully here. Christina is a woman whose body has been rebuilt and whose mind has been replaced. A slight distance in the eyes, a hesitation in the gestures, a sense that she is acting under someone else's orders: all of it fits.

Hammer had found the perfect role for her. It was a role about a woman with no control over her own body.

The Voice That Was Taken

And then came the cruellest detail.

When the film was edited, the producers decided her Austrian accent was too strong. Her voice was removed and replaced with the voice of another actress, Jane Hands. Every word Christina speaks in the finished film comes from someone else.

Dubbing was common practice in British and European cinema of the time, and Denberg was far from the only foreign actress to lose her voice in post-production. But in her case, the symbolism is overwhelming.

On screen, Christina is a woman whose body is controlled by a man's soul and whose identity has been rewritten by a scientist. Off screen, the actress playing her had her name changed by a studio contest, her image shaped by a men's magazine and now her voice erased by her producers. The character and the actress were both, in their own ways, assembled by other people.

It was her first and only leading role in a feature film. She carried the story. She was on the poster. And audiences around the world never heard her speak.

A Career Peak, and an Ending

The film opened in the United States on 15 March 1967 and in Britain on 18 June. It found its audience and, over the decades, its admirers. Today, for Hammer fans, Susan Denberg is Christina, and Christina is one of the most beautiful and tragic creations in the studio's history.

At the time, it should have been the beginning. A lead role opposite Peter Cushing, for the most famous horror studio in the world, at twenty-two. It looked like the moment a career takes off.

Instead, it was the last time she would ever appear in a new film.

Helped or Hurt? Dissecting the Susan Denberg Case

Here is the strange arithmetic of Susan Denberg's career. Within roughly eighteen months she had a Warner Bros. film with Janet Leigh, several network television parts, a role in what would become the most famous science-fiction series ever made, a Playboy centerfold, a Playmate of the Year nomination and the lead in a Hammer horror film opposite Peter Cushing.

Most young actresses would wait a decade for that list. She had it all before her twenty-third birthday. And then it stopped.

So what happened? Let's take the case apart piece by piece, the way a critic would take apart a film.

What Worked in Her Favour

The face and the timing. The mid-sixties were hungry for a certain kind of European glamour. Bardot, Ursula Andress, Elke Sommer and Senta Berger had shown that a foreign accent and a striking face could sell tickets in America and Britain. Denberg arrived exactly when producers were searching for the next one.

The stage discipline. Years in the Bluebell line gave her posture, stamina and comfort in front of an audience. On set, she knew how to hold a position, find her light and stay still. That is a real skill, and it served her well in front of cameras that mainly wanted to look at her.

The publicity. The Playboy feature gave her national fame almost overnight, and Hammer cast her soon after. Whatever its costs, the centerfold delivered exactly what it promised: attention.

What Worked Against Her

Image before experience. Her fame arrived in the wrong order. Most actresses build a body of work and then, if they become stars, the glamour follows. Denberg became a famous picture first. When producers met her, they already knew her as a shape in a magazine, not as a performer with something to say.

The accent as a wall. The accent that made her exotic in a one-scene television role became a barrier the moment she carried a film. Hammer solved the problem by replacing her voice. That solution fixed one movie and quietly announced to the industry that she could not yet carry dialogue in English.

It is worth comparing her with others. Ursula Andress was dubbed in Dr. No, yet went on to a long career. The Polish-born Ingrid Pitt, whose accent was just as strong, became a Hammer icon a few years later. Being dubbed was not, on its own, fatal. What those women had, and Denberg apparently did not, was time, persistence and support to work through it.

No room to grow. She had no formal training beyond a studio workshop. In the old studio system, a promising newcomer might have been placed under contract, coached in voice and movement and given small roles to build up confidence. By 1966 that system had largely collapsed. Newcomers were expected to arrive ready, deliver, and make room for the next face.

A type, not a career. Mitzi, Ruta, Magda, Christina. The industry never asked what else she could do. A woman who is only ever cast for her look has a very short shelf life, because there is always a younger, newer face next season.

The Lost Second Chance

There is one more piece, and it is the saddest.

According to at least one biographical account, Denberg had signed with Hammer to star in The Vengeance of She, the studio's follow-up to its 1965 adventure She with Ursula Andress. Personal problems reportedly prevented her from continuing, and the part went instead to the Czech actress Olinka Berova.

This claim comes from a single source, so it should be treated with caution. But if it is true, it changes the shape of the story. A second Hammer lead would have meant another poster, another year in the business and another chance to grow into her talent. Instead, the door closed at the moment it had just opened.

The Swinging Sixties Had a Price

We cannot discuss what went wrong without looking at the culture around her. Denberg's rise coincided with the peak of the sixties party scene in Los Angeles and London: endless nights, easy money, LSD and the idea that rules no longer applied. Several biographical sources say she became deeply immersed in that lifestyle.

It would be too easy, and unfair, to blame either the industry or the woman alone. A twenty-two-year-old immigrant, newly famous, with a marriage that was ending, no family nearby and no one whose job was to protect her, walked into an environment that consumed even well-supported stars. She made choices, as everyone does. But the system around her made those choices far more dangerous than they should have been.

The Verdict

So, did the glamour help or hurt her?

Both, and in that order. It lifted her higher and faster than her experience could support, and then left her without the foundations to stay there. Playboy, Star Trek and Hammer did not destroy Susan Denberg. But together they built a career out of photographs, and a career made of photographs is easy to admire and very hard to live inside.

When the cameras moved on, the woman behind the pictures still had to find her way home.

After the Spotlight: Where Is Susan Denberg Now?

When Frankenstein Created Woman reached cinemas in 1967, its star was already slipping away from the business that had made her famous. There was no farewell, no announcement, no final interview on a studio lot. The roles simply stopped coming, and Susan Denberg went home.

The Return to Austria

After the Hammer film, she could not find further acting work. Her marriage to Tony Scotti ended in divorce in 1968. Disillusioned with the life she had found in Hollywood and London, she returned to Austria.

Home did not bring peace straight away. Several sources describe a period of serious personal crisis after her return, with alcohol and drug use and a stay in a hospital in Klagenfurt for treatment. Newspapers of the time printed photographs of a troubled young woman at home with her mother, a sharp contrast to the glowing images of only two years earlier.

In an interview published in Midnight magazine on 22 July 1968, under the headline "LSD Wrecked My Life," she spoke openly about falling into alcohol and drugs, including LSD, after leaving the film world. It is one of the rare moments in her story when we hear something close to her own voice. Not dubbed. Not chosen by contest. Not posed under a photographer's lights. Simply a young woman telling the press, honestly and painfully, that the glamorous life had nearly cost her everything.

That voice deserves respect. In an era when stars were expected to smile and say the right things, she told the truth.

The Rumours of Her Death

As she disappeared from the screen, the rumours began. For years, articles, fan publications and even reference books claimed that Susan Denberg had died in the late 1960s, from an overdose or by her own hand. Some fans believed it for decades.

It was not true. She was alive, in Austria, slowly rebuilding a life away from cameras. The rumour said more about the culture that repeated it than about her. A beautiful actress who vanishes is easier to turn into a tragic legend than to follow into an ordinary, difficult recovery. Fans preferred the myth. The woman herself was quietly getting on with living.

Later, an American newspaper ran a story headlined "The Return of Susan Denberg," correcting the record for readers who had assumed the worst.

Vienna Nights and Motherhood

The 1970s brought a new chapter. In 1971 she gave birth to her son, Wolfgang. To support herself, she took work that drew on the skills she knew best: she worked as a topless waitress at an adult cinema in Vienna and later as a dancer in nightclubs in Vienna and Switzerland, including a Viennese club called Renz.

There is a quiet circle in that detail. The young woman who began her career in the feathered lines of the Bluebell Girls ended her performing life on the small stages of Viennese nightclubs. The lights were dimmer and the audiences smaller, but she was once again the dancer, the figure in the light, the shape that holds a room's attention for a few minutes.

In 1976 her daughter, Margarethe, was born, and Denberg stepped away from dancing for good. For a time, under her married name, Dietlinde Scotti, she lived in Vienna's tenth district. Eventually, she went back to where it had all begun.

Klagenfurt, Under Her Own Name

According to the most recent reports, Susan Denberg lives in Klagenfurt, the lakeside city of her childhood, under her real name, Dietlinde Zechner. In August 2026 she turned eighty-two.

She has not returned to acting, and she has largely avoided the convention circuit where many cult stars of her generation sign photographs for fans. Her only later screen credit is archival: images of her appear in The World of Hammer, the 1994 documentary series that celebrated the studio's history.

Yet her image is everywhere. Hammer fan groups mark her birthday each year with dozens of messages. Star Trek fans still debate the best moments of "Mudd's Women." Collectors trade her vintage press photographs and postcards from across Europe. Frankenstein Created Woman has been restored and released on Blu-ray, and Christina's pale, vengeful beauty looks as haunting today as it did in 1967.

There is a certain justice in where she has ended up. The industry gave her a new name, a manufactured image and someone else's voice. In Klagenfurt, she is simply Dietlinde again, a name no studio contest chose and no marketing department approved.

The world still remembers Susan Denberg. The woman who wore that name seems to have found her way back to herself.

The Venus Who Walked Away

Close your eyes and the images come back in a slow dissolve. A Bluebell girl in feathers, one perfect silhouette in a line of many. Magda Kovacs stepping onto the bridge of the Enterprise in a cloud of sequins and borrowed glamour. Miss August 1966, warm skin and teased blonde hair under a photographer's soft key light. Christina waking on Baron Frankenstein's table, pale and luminous, with someone else's soul behind her eyes and someone else's voice in her mouth.

Susan Denberg gave the sixties some of its most beautiful pictures. The sixties gave her almost nothing she could keep.

Her story is a short one, but it says a great deal about an era that sold women as images first and performers second. The centerfold opened doors. The accent closed them. The studio renamed her, the magazine framed her and the producers dubbed her, and when the party ended there was no system waiting to catch her. That she survived it, rebuilt her life, raised two children and went home to live under her own name is perhaps the most quietly remarkable part of the whole tale.

On the late-night screen, though, she never ages. Somewhere a Blu-ray spins, the candles flicker in Frankenstein's laboratory, James Bernard's melody rises, and Christina opens her eyes once more, beautiful, silent and impossible to forget.

In the next article of our Mistresses of Hammer series, we follow the woman who took the role Susan Denberg reportedly lost: the Czech beauty Olinka Berova, Hammer's new She.

Frequently Asked Questions About Susan Denberg

Who is Susan Denberg?

Susan Denberg is a German-born Austrian former dancer, model and actress, born Dietlinde Zechner on 2 August 1944. She was a Bluebell dancer, Playboy's Playmate of the Month for August 1966, Magda Kovacs in the Star Trek episode "Mudd's Women" and the star of Hammer's Frankenstein Created Woman (1967).

Is Susan Denberg still alive?

Yes. Despite long-running rumours that she died in the late 1960s, the most recent reports say she is alive and living in Klagenfurt, Austria, under her real name, Dietlinde Zechner. She turned 82 in August 2026.

Who did Susan Denberg play in Star Trek?

She played Magda Kovacs, one of the three women brought aboard the Enterprise by con man Harry Mudd in "Mudd's Women," which first aired on 13 October 1966. The other two were played by Karen Steele and Maggie Thrett.

Was Susan Denberg a Playboy Playmate?

Yes. She was Playmate of the Month in the August 1966 issue of Playboy and later a finalist for 1967 Playmate of the Year, a title won by Lisa Baker.

Who directed Frankenstein Created Woman?

Terence Fisher directed the 1967 Hammer film, with Peter Cushing as Baron Frankenstein and Susan Denberg as Christina. Anthony Hinds wrote it as John Elder, Arthur Grant was the cinematographer and James Bernard composed the music.

Was Susan Denberg's voice dubbed in Frankenstein Created Woman?

Yes. Her Austrian accent was considered too strong, so her lines were dubbed by another actress, reportedly Jane Hands.

What is Susan Denberg's real name?

Her birth name is Dietlinde Zechner. Warner Bros. held a contest to give her a screen name, and she became Susan Denberg. She has also used her married name, Dietlinde Scotti.

How many films did Susan Denberg make?

Only two feature films: An American Dream (1966), with Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh, and Frankenstein Created Woman (1967). She also guested on TV in 12 O'Clock High, The Wackiest Ship in the Army and Star Trek.

Why did Susan Denberg quit acting?

After Frankenstein Created Woman she could not find further roles, her marriage ended in 1968 and she struggled with the drug culture of the late sixties. She returned to Austria and never made another film.

Who was Susan Denberg married to?

She married actor and singer Tony Scotti in Las Vegas in 1965. They divorced in 1968. Scotti later married French singer Sylvie Vartan.

Does Susan Denberg have children?

Yes. Her son, Wolfgang, was born in 1971 and her daughter, Margarethe, in 1976.

Where can I watch Frankenstein Created Woman and "Mudd's Women"?

Frankenstein Created Woman is available on Blu-ray and DVD, and Star Trek: The Original Series streams on Paramount+ in many regions. Streaming catalogues change often, so check a service like JustWatch for your country.