Valli Kemp

Valli Kemp (born 19 November 1950) is an Australian former model and actress, turned fashion designer, painter and art teacher. She is best known for her involvement in several high-profile beauty contests in the early 1970s, and for her memorable role in the cult 1972 horror film Dr. Phibes Rises Again, in which she appeared opposite Vincent Price as the murderous doctor's silent assistant and accomplice, Vulnavia.

By her own account, Valli Kemp was born in Kenya to British parents. During the Mau Mau Uprising of the 1950s, Kemp's father "lost everything" (as she later put it) and the family, including seven-year-old Kemp, relocated to London. Kemp and her parents subsequently migrated to Australia when she was twelve years old, although her older brother George (eight years her senior) remained in England. The family settled in Sydney. Kemp, who had become interested in art while still a young child in Africa, left school at the age of fourteen and gained a position with Berlei Ltd, a prominent and long-established Australian firm of brassiere and corset manufacturers, where she worked on poster design and window dressing.

It was also at the age of fourteen that Kemp began her career as a model. She appeared in numerous TV commercials as well as a promotional video made by the Beach Boys during their first tour of Australia in 1964. Kemp was later discovered by the publishers of the Australasian Post, an enduring and popular illustrated magazine, on which she appeared as a cover girl on no fewer than 27 occasions. In 1967, she was photographed alongside an American sailor on board a visiting destroyer, the USS Epperson. Her fame began to spread outside Australia as early as December 1969, when a revealing photograph of Kemp in a bikini ("in an old-fashioned check with braids and frills") was published in an Ohio newspaper.

Kemp's modelling profile rose steadily during 1970, when she entered the Quest of Quests, an annual beauty pageant sponsored by Waltons department store in Sydney, which, at that time, was Australia's most prestigious beauty contest. In July of that year, she was photographed on the arm of TV personality Graham Kennedy, attending a special a gala performance of the musical Hair, to celebrate the first anniversary of the show's Sydney premiere. Kemp was described in the press as "a stunning gypsy in a black dress with embroidered bodice and belt, set off with a brilliant scarf, hoop earrings and shiny red boots". Two months later, on 20 September, Kemp won the Quest of Quests and was duly crowned with the title of Miss World Australia in a ceremony held at the Wentworth Hotel. Later accounts of the Quest of Quests beauty contest noted that Kemp, with her "boudoir eyes and full lips", represented the epitome of early 1970s glamour.

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