Brigid Bazlen; Film Actress, Ex-Child Star

Brigid Bazlen, a child star who flew around Chicago sound stages as a fairy in a Peabody Award-winning children’s TV show and later was cast as the earthy seductress Salome in 1961’s epic motion picture “King of Kings,” has died of cancer.

She was staying with her mother, retired Chicago Tribune columnist Maggie Daly, in Bellevue, Wash., a Seattle suburb, when she died May 25. She was 44.

Miss Bazlen had been an actress since age 7, working in Chicago television as the Blue Fairy after appearing earlier in other series. It was there that she was seen by an agent of producer Samuel Bronston, who cast her in his biblical epic. She became Herod’s sensuous stepdaughter, and her dancing and acting brought her further offers, one of them opposite Steve McQueen in the farcical “The Honeymoon Machine.”

She also appeared as the attractive young daughter of a villainous cave-dwelling family in “How the West Was Won,” the girl who lured Jimmy Stewart to mischief.

She had worked most recently in the Seattle area as a designer in stained glass.