Maila Nurmi's Vampira Dead at 85: TV Host was Creator of the "Goth" Look

Maila Nurmi, the first "Goth" to register in the public consciousness with her gig as the television host "Vampira" in the mid-1950s, died of cardiac arrest during her sleep on January 10, 2008. As the ghoulish and sexy Vampira, Nurmi hosted a late night showcase of horror films on Los Angeles TV in 1954-55, winning her an Emmy Award nomination and a cult following that lasted over 50 years.

The woman who would become Vampira was born Maila Elizabeth Syrjäniemi on December 11, 1921, in Petsamo, Finland. The young Maila and her family moved to the United States two years later, settling in a Finnish-American community in Ohio. Claiming that world-class Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi ("The Flying Finn") was her uncle, Maila took his surname as her own when she moved to New York at the age of 17 with dreams of breaking into show business.

Like many a young beauty with stars in her eyes and a limited amount of cash in her purse, Nurmi was forced to become an exotic dancer after hitting the Big Apple. To make ends meet, she also was a model for photographers. Reportedly, it was the great theatrical impresario Mike Todd (Elizabeth Taylor's fourth husband) who cast the young Maila in the Broadway burly-cue revue Spook Scandals, where she first played a vampire. In his incarnation as a Broadway showman, Todd was famed for being a master of shows featuring "low comedy and tall broads," frequently presented en déshabillé (or nude, as in the case of Michael Todd's Peepshow).

Spook Scandals wasn't one of the maestro's great successes, the revue running all of two performances in December 1944. If Maila did indeed appear in the show, she would have had to have been 13 years old and lied to the producers or later lied about her birth age when she had her 15-minutes of fame in the 1950s.