In her second feature film, twenty-two-year-old Joyce Meadows starred as Sally Fallon, the levelheaded and good-humored fiancée of an atomic scientist (played by B movie stalwart John Agar). Directed by Nathan Juran, 1957’s The Brain from Planet Arous concerns an evil alien brain with diabolical intentions who arrives on Earth and possesses Agar’s body. Things take an even more unexpected turn when a benevolent brain from the same planet, in criminal pursuit of the evil brain, possesses Meadows’s dog. It’s really something. This was the only science fiction film Meadows ever made, yet over the next half century, The Brain from Planet Arous would develop a solid cult following, and it remains the film for which she’s best remembered.

Meadows was born Joyce Burger in Alberta, Canada, in 1935, though by the time she was nine the family had settled in Sacramento, California. Before making the leap to Hollywood, when she was nineteen, Meadows had already been working as a stage actress and singer, and had even been voted, much to her surprise, Miss Sacramento of 1953.