Pilar Seurat; Versatile TV, Film Actress

Pilar Seurat, dancer and actress who portrayed beauties in several films, including “The Young Savages,” and in television series of the 1950s and 1960s, has died. She was 62.

Seurat, who used the name Pilar Cerveris off-screen, died June 2 in her Los Angeles home of lung cancer.

Born Rita Hernandez in Manila, she moved to Los Angeles as a child and began her career as a dancer, working with Ken Murray’s “Blackouts” troupe.

She moved into acting in the late 1950s with guest roles on such popular television fare as “Maverick,” “Rawhide,” “Naked City” and “Bonanza.”

After a key role in the 1961 film “The Young Savages,” starring Burt Lancaster as an idealistic district attorney, Seurat became highly popular over the next decade. Whenever a western or detective series of 1960s television called for an Asian woman casting directors immediately thought of the Eurasian Seurat.

She was Princess Ching Ling on “The Wild, Wild West,” Amra Palli in “The Man from UNCLE” and Moana on “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.” In films, she portrayed Camota in “Battle at Bloody Beach,” Mai-Lu in “The Seven Women From Hell” and Miss Santiago in “A Death of Innocence.”

Busiest on television, Seurat appeared in several episodes of “The FBI” and delved into science fiction in a 1966 episode of “Star Trek”--an experience that inadvertently shaped the career of her only son She took a “Star Trek” phaser home to her little boy, Dean Devlin. He grew up to write and co-produce such science fiction films as “Stargate” and “Independence Day” and the 1998 “Godzilla.”

Seurat was married and divorced twice, first to Don Devlin, producer of such feature films as “The Witches of Eastwick,” and to Don Cerveris.

She is survived by her son; a sister, artist Angela Hernandez; and a half sister, TV producer Alana Lambros.

The family has asked that memorial donations be sent to the Israel Cancer Research Foundation, 8383 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 341, Beverly Hills, CA 90211.