Actress and screenwriter Louise “Bunny” Downe, 88, has died, it was announced on Aug. 8. A psychiatry student at the University of Miami, she left school in favor of the show business. Downe worked frequently with director Herschell Gordon Lewis, on such 1960s exploitation flicks as The Psychic, Nature’s Playmates, Boin-n-g, A Taste of Blood, The Girl the Body and the Pill, Goldilocks and the Three Bares, How to Make a Doll, The Alley Tramp, Blast-Off Girls, Suburban Roulette, This Stuff’ll Kill Ya!, The Gruesome Twosome, She-Devil on Wheels, Scum of the Earth, The Gore Gore Girls, and The Wizard of Gore. Sometimes Downe was in front of the camera, sometimes behind (as assistant director, screenwriter, or other crew). She pretty much disappeared in the 1970s, and rarely gave interviews, though she was recently rediscovered by aficionados of nudie and grindhouse films and hailed as one of the few women with some pull in the making of these films, and not just acting in them.
