Luan Peters

Luan Peters (born 18 June 1946, Bethnal Green, London), also known as Karol Keyes, is an English actress and singer.

Biography

Born as Carol Hirsch, she made her stage debut in a pantomime aged four, then went on to win a drama scholarship at age 16 after a performance of Twelfth Night.

She started singing in a band for £2 a night as a way of earning extra money while attending drama school. Her singing career began in Manchester, where under the name Karol Keyes (named after her management Keystone Promotions), she fronted “Karol Keyes and the Big Sound”, a band previously known as “The Fat Sound”. One of her first records was an Ike & Tina Turner number called "A Fool in Love" on Columbia. She left that band in June 1966. A year later, she joined Joan Littlewood’s drama school at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

In 1970, she starred in the 13-part television series Go Girl, as a go-go dancer who finds herself involved in action-oriented story lines. The series was beset by problems, which included the financiers backing out, the production running out of money, and the actors' union closing the production down. The series was never broadcast. The pilot episode only saw the light of day more than a decade after it was made, when it was released twice on UK video in the early 1980s - once under the title Give Me a Ring Sometime (which is actually just the pilot episode title) and on the second occasion as Passport to Murder.

Peters is known for her appearances in Hammer horror films of the 1970s such as Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971). Other film credits include Man of Violence (1969), Freelance (1971), Not Tonight, Darling (1971), The Flesh and Blood Show (1972), Vampira (1974), Land of the Minotaur (1976), The Wildcats of St Trinian's (1980) and Pacific Banana (1981).

Her stage work includes A Man Most Likely To (1969, with George Cole), Pyjama Tops (1969), Decameron 73 (1973), playing Linda McCartney in John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert (1974), Tom Stoppard's Dirty Linen (1976), Shut Your Eyes And Think Of England! (1978) and Funny Peculiar (1985).

She was also active on television in series such as: Z-Cars, Public Eye, Doctor Who (in the serials Frontier in Space and The Macra Terror), Target, The Professionals and the Fawlty Towers episode The Psychiatrist playing Raylene Miles, an Australian tourist. Her last known television role was in an episode in The Bill in 1990. In 2005 she was interviewed for the documentary Fawlty Towers Revisited.

Discography

Singles

• "The Good Love The Bad Love" "Gonna Find me a Substitute" (Karol Keyes & the Big Sound, Unreleased Abbey Rd. EMI audition Recording)
• "No One Can Take Your Place"/"You Beat Me To The Punch" (Fontana TF517 December 1964) (as Karol Keyes)
• "Can't You Hear the Music"/"The Sweetest Touch" (Fontana TF 846 July 1967) (as Karol Keyes)
• "One in a Million" (1964) (as Karol Keyes)
• "A Fool in Love/The Good Love and the Bad Love" (1966) (as Karol Keyes)
• "Crazy Annie/ Colours" (1970)
• "Everything I Want to Do/Billy Come Down" (1973, Polydor)
• "Love Countdown/Beach Love" (1977, CBS, Germany)
• "Dolphin Dive" (1979)
• "It's Me Again Margaret/Henhouse Holiday" (1980, Precision)
• "Trouble" (1981, from the film ‘Pacific Banana’)

References

External links

• Luan Peters at the Internet Movie Database
• Article about Karol Keyes and the Big Sound
• Viva Peters – Career of Luan Peters