Vitina Marcus

Vitina was born Dolores Vitina Marcus in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, of Sicilian and Hungarian parentage to Frank Marcus and his wife Rose. In her teens, she studied ballet, learned to play the violin and worked briefly as a model for the Huntington Hartford Agency. At the age of 17, she began taking classes at Lee Strasberg's Actor's Studio. Adopting the first name of her Sicilian grandmother, she made her screen debut as Dolores Vitina, one of sixteen female dancers comprising The June Taylor Dancers, featured weekly on The Jackie Gleason Show (1952). Her motion picture debut followed soon after in the crime drama Never Love a Stranger (1958).

Between 1959 and 1970, Vitina appeared in many a classic TV show, her exotic, sultry looks ideally suited for casting as Native Americans: in Have Gun - Will Travel (1957) (as Della White Cloud, an Apache princess), in Death Valley Days (1952), Rawhide (1959), Gunsmoke (1955) and in The Virginian (1962). As a 'female Tarzan', she captured Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn) in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964), set in Africa. As Kublai Khan's daughter, she was wooed by James Darren in The Time Tunnel (1966). After her introduction to producer Irwin Allen, sometime around 1959 or 1960, Vitina was often featured in Allen's fantasy or science fiction-themed productions. Her characters were regularly menaced by dinosaurs, phantoms and giant spiders, painted gold, or, more famously, green. Stranger still, was her romantic pursuit of the nefarious and cowardly Dr. Zachary Smith (Jonathan Harris) in the Lost in Space (1965) episode 'The Girl from the Green Dimension'. Her role as Athena, aka 'The Green Lady', has remained the one for which she is most fondly remembered and is also her own personal favorite.

After her retirement from acting in 1970, Vitina moved to Las Vegas. She worked for some time as a cocktail waitress before becoming a real estate broker under her married name Vitina Graham.