Camilla Sparv

Camilla Sparv (born Camilla Margareta Sparv on 3 June 1943 in Stockholm, Sweden) is a Swedish actress whose career spanned the late 1960s through the early 1990s. After beginning as a photographer’s model in her native capital, she was discovered by film producers and made her screen debut in the mid‑1960s, quickly gaining attention for her striking looks and poised performances. Her breakout role came opposite James Coburn in the crime‑drama Dead Heat on a Merry‑Go‑Round (1966), a performance that earned her a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer in 1967 and cemented her reputation as a rising talent in Hollywood. Throughout the next decade Sparv appeared in a diverse slate of films, ranging from the spy thriller Murderers’ Row (1966) and the comedy‑drama The Trouble with Angels (1966) to the sports drama Downhill Racer (1969) and the adventure epic Caboblanco (1980). She also ventured into television, guest‑starring on popular series such as Airwolf, The Rockford Files (season 2, episode 19), The Love Boat, Hawaii Five‑O, and the 1981 miniseries Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls. In 1977 she featured in the pilot “Never Con a Killer” for the short‑lived ABC crime drama The Feather and Father Gang. Beyond her professional achievements, Sparv’s personal life attracted media interest; she was briefly married to film producer Robert Evans in the mid‑1960s, then to Hoover vacuum heir Herbert W. ‘Bunker’ Hoover III with whom she had two children, and later to financier Fred Kolber, a noted Madoff investor, with whom she had a third child. Despite retiring from acting in the early 1990s, Sparv’s early work remains a vivid illustration of the international talent that helped shape American genre cinema of the era.