Dolores Fuller

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Dolores Fuller

Dolores Fuller (born 1923) is best known as the one-time girlfriend of the low-budget film director Edward D. Wood, Jr. She played the protagonist's girlfriend in Glen or Glenda and a filing clerk in Bride of the Monster.

According to Fuller, the female lead in the latter film was written for Fuller but Wood gave it to Loretta King instead when she offered to help "finance" the movie. King denies the allegation to this day.

According to Fuller, as quoted in "Nightmare Of Ecstasy", she first met Ed Wood when she went to a casting call with a friend for a movie he was supposed to direct called "Behind Locked Doors". She became his girlfriend shortly thereafter and began acting in his films.

Fuller had already had earlier experience on television in "Queen For A Day" and the Dinah Shore Show. As Fuller remembers, it she was the one "putting bread on the table .

Another quote from her : "I had a size four and a half foot , so I modelled the slippers in an artist's short smock."

She lost her job on the Dinah Shore show when, and I quote : "We were shooting all night, and into the next day, and time just got away from me, and I didn't realize that I was supposed to be on the set working as Dinah's double on her show, Chevy Theatre. I completely messed up my job, I was what they called a no show."

She was portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker in Tim Burton's 1994 Wood biopic Ed Wood, a film of which she disapproved due to the image of her smoking in the film. Fuller says she never smoked.

Fuller's ability as a songwriter manifested itself through the intervention of her friend, producer Hal Wallis; Fuller had wanted to get an acting role in the Elvis Presley movie Blue Hawaii, which Wallis was producing, but instead he put her in touch with Hill & Range, the publisher that provided Presley with songs. Fuller went into a collaborative partnership with composer Ben Weisman and got one song, "Rock-A-Hula Baby", into Blue Hawaii. It was a beginning that eventually led to Elvis Presley recording a dozen of her songs, including "I Got Lucky" and "Spinout".

Fuller also had her music recorded by Nat 'King' Cole, Peggy Lee, and other leading talents of the time.

As Fuller says of the period before her success, " He (Ed Wood) begged me to marry him. I loved him in a way, but I couldn't handle the transvestism. I'm a very normal person. It's hard for me to deviate ! I wanted a man that was all man. After we broke up, he would stand outside my home in Burbank and cry. "Let me in, I love you!" What good would I have done if I had married him ? We would have starved together. I bettered myself. I had to uplift myself."