See You Around, Super Heroine!

Sad as this may be, sometimes it takes the death of a person for us to remember that he or she was ever alive. That turned out to be the case for me, as I read this afternoon about model-actress Tamara Dobson’s passing at age 59. Most of you probably don’t recognize Dobson’s moniker, but in 1973 she had the title role in the “blaxploitation” adventure film Cleopatra Jones, playing a fashion-conscious, take-no-prisoners U.S. special agent assigned to choke off drug trafficking worldwide. My memory of that film (and it’s been a long, long time since I saw it) is that it was pretty cheesy; yet it spawned a 1975 sequel and made the 6-foot-2-inch Dobson a star--albeit briefly. Reportedly, the character later inspired Beyoncé Knowles’ portrayal of Foxxy Cleopatra in the 2002 film Austin Powers: Goldmember.

Dobson went on from the Cleopatra Jones flicks to appear on television’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and in the movie Amazons (1984). She evidently died in her hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, this last Monday, October 2, of complications from pneumonia and multiple sclerosis.

READ MORE: “Cleopatra Jones, 1973,” by Marty McKee (Letterboxd).