In the '80s, the bygone era of freewheeling sleaze took on a nostalgic glow and by the '90s, the real rain had come: Theater after theater sat empty, marquees that once advertised shockers like Make Then Die Slowly and Farewell, Uncle Tom bore Jenny Holzer aphorisms, and Times Square's decades-in-the-planning makeover finally materialized. Today, the Disney-fied Deuce is a gaudy strip-mall of multiplex cinemas and generic tourist attractions like Madame Tussaud's. But you should've seen it when.

Loosely, "Times Square" describes the whole theater district. Technically, it's the intersection of Broadway, Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street, the triangular island where 1 Times Square has stood since 1904 (before The New York Times made its daring move uptown from Park Row, the place was just Long Acre Square). But in the popular imagination, Times Square is the Deuce, the block of 42nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, where continuous entertainment reigned for the better part of a century: live nude girls, Hubert's Flea circus, vaudeville, burlesque, adult book stores, lunatic street preachers, hookers, pushers, peep shows, amusement arcades, even live-sex shows. And of course, a tantalizing and ever-shifting mix of exploitation, sexploitation, drugsploitation, blaxploitation, gore, mondo and martial arts movies, as well as softcore (and, later, hardcore) porn and unclassifiable weirdness.

The Apollo, the Victory and the New Amsterdam have been reborn as legitimate houses. The Empire theater was incorporated into the massive AMC Empire, like a worn-to-rags toy stuffed into a shiny new body. The rest of the 42nd Street theaters were reduced to rubble: It was necessary to destroy Times Square in order to save it. If movies set 42nd Street on the road to ruin, they also preserved it: Taxi Driver, The Sweet Smell of Success, Shadows, Report to the Commissioner, The Killing, Midnight Cowboy, the original Shaft and Basket Case...rent 'em and weep.

By all rights, Barbara Steele's face should be kittenish: the high, wide forehead; the huge, round eyes; the tiny tapered chin. But it's nothing of the kind. It's a pale, angular mask as hard and polished as her name. Steele's face is simultaneously alluring and alarming, never cute. Critic Raymond Durgnat once declared that Steele's very eyelids snarl, and the late Italian director Riccardo Freda, who worked with her twice, rhapsodized that "in certain conditions of light and color...her face assumes a cast that doesn't appear to be quite human." Only in horror films, of course, is that something about which to rhapsodize.

And so Steele, an actress of formidable intelligence, talent, beauty and high-minded (if sometimes eccentric) standards became a not a star, not a beloved character actress or a household name (except, of course, in a few select households), but a cult icon. She is the sadomasochistic Madonna of the cinefantastique; the queen of the wild, the beautiful and the damned; and to her fans - let's call them Steelers - the one and only true Mother of Darkness. Steele's peculiar career is inextricably bound up with the golden age of horror all'Italiana; her double role in Mario Bava's directing debut, the haunting Black Sunday/La maschera del demonio (1960), was her fifth movie credit but the first of any consequence. In later years she would sigh that though Black Sunday was undoubtedly a masterpiece of poetic horror, it was a cinematographer's vision through and through; the girl on screen could have been anyone. In this Steele is thoroughly mistaken; the girl onscreen could have been no-one else.

Though Steele felt a bit underused as an actress, she slipped willingly into the haunted spirit of Black Sunday, the picture that later prompted her to theorize that "film is so porous, and to my mind so occult, that I think film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin." She further recalled that even while it was being shot, the lushly black and white production was "was so monochromatic that nobody, not even a crew member, wore a single color on the set - hypnotically beautiful, shrouded in fog, luminous and incandescent, with all the elements of a religious manifestation." And despite the inherent spookiness of the shoot, Steele had nothing but soothing memories of Bava, the soul of courtesy and gentility, "like a ghost, a man in silent shoes. I could barely feel his presence." Perhaps his tranquil manner so impressed her because she had reservations about the wild and crazy Italian film industry.

Bava later recalled that Steele "was superstitious, afraid of Italians. She refused to come to the set because someone had told her I was using a special film stock that, when developed, made the actors look naked! Maybe she misunderstood someone who told her I did camera tricks, or something like that. I reassured the poor woman by saying that if I'd had such an invention, I'd have made millions long ago." Black Sunday was acquired for US distribution by exploitation specialists American International Pictures, which promptly hired Steele to star opposite Vincent Price in The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), one of the better entries in its successful Edgar Allen Poe series. There she perfected the art of screaming on cue ("[it] takes a certain amount of concentration," she told Hyams, who apparently couldn't resist coming round for another dose of her caustic wit) and found time to charm gossip columnist Louella O. Parsons, an aging dragon who was once the scourge of Hollywood. Even in the '60, long past her heyday, it didn't pay to offend her. Pasons declared Steele a lovely girl, even after Steele weaseled her way out of Parsons' attempt to get her to bad-mouth her friend Charlie Chaplin (who was driven out of Hollywood and into Swiss exile in 1949, amidst red scare hysteria that the likes of Parsons had helped stir up).

But Steele still wasn't planning to stay in California, though she hung around long enough to appear in a 1961 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called "Beta Gamma Delta." She declared Hollywood "one great big scrambled neon egg" where "[e]veryone seems to walk around carrying their money on their backs." Plus ca change, and all that. "I'll stay in Hollywood for good," she declared, "when people out here listen to what comes out of people's mouths instead of looking at their measurements." Then, as now, there was no chance of that and so off she went, back to la bella Italia to play witches and bitches. Which brings us to the year of Fellini and Freda.

First there was Fellini, who was working on 8 1/2, about a movie director named Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) and his surreal adventures as he tries to come up with his next picture. 8 1/2 was a long time aborning; actors were on call for months, hanging around the Fellini carnival and waiting for their turn in the spotlight. Steele, whom Fellini affectionately called "Barbarina," got to bring all that dance training of hers to bear on her twist scene; naturally, she thought she was awful. "What I'm doing is so bad!" she lamented at the time. "It might be better, though, if I had five brandies under my belt."

And then she waited; finally Fellini released her to work with Freda, a man who wasted no time when there was film to expose. And what exposure The Horrible Dr. Hitchcock was! Films about necrophilia lie pretty thin on the ground, and Freda cast the coolly beautiful Steele as the innocent second wife of pervy Dr. H (Robert Flemyng), who likes his women very cool indeed; for once she was the victim rather than the victimizer. They worked "18-hour days, charged with Sambucca and coffee. If the dolly broke down, Freda would merely drag the camera on a carpet. Nothing would stop this man," Steele marveled.

Naturally, maestro Fellini called while she was in the thick of things. "I got this mad call from Federico in the middle of the night, saying, 'We've got this great sequence [for you].' I said, 'I can't; I've got another third of this film to shoot in the next two days!' So I lost a great sequence in 8 1/2 because of Dr. Hichcock." And yet in the end she loved both directors. "Freda is very seductive and intimate with his actors," she recalled before his death in 1999, at age 90. "He takes them aside, gives them little cookies and drinks, and tells them they're beautiful and wonderful...He was [also] ornery, emotional, violent, fueled with a passionate energy and a compulsive gambler...I understood his frustration and rages and operatic deliveries. His whole life was a mini opera."

People often figure "Ralph Zucker" for another of those pseudonyms behind which Italian directors were always hiding, and many sources attribute Terror-Creatures to Massimo Pupillo (The Bloody Pit of Horror), who sometimes called himself Max Hunter. But as the late Alan Upchurch, Steele fan extraordinaire, documented, Zucker was a real person who knocked around the Italian film industry in various capacities and died in Los Angeles in 1982.

But she was looking for a change; she'd learned something about screenwriting from Poe and, wisely, managed to forget anything she remembered about the way they did it in Italy. "I had to stop this [acting] nonsense and have an adult existence," she remembers. I wrote something that sold...then I got into development. I have a really great eye for material, actually. That sounds frightfully pompous, but I really do have this phenomenal voodoo about it... I started covering material and making readers' reports, things like that. I worked at MGM and Paramount." In 1980, Steele made her last feature film appearance for almost 15 years, as a mute madwoman in the seedy Silent Scream.

Steele began working for Dan Curtis in 1978; Curtis was the man who thought to combine horror and soap opera in TV's long-running Dark Shadows (1966-1971), and pioneered the made-for-TV horror movie boomlet of the early '70s. But the high point of Steele and Curtis' work together had nothing to do with horror — at least, not the supernatural kind.

Curtis acquired the rights to Herman Wouk's epic novel The Winds of War, which he planned to produce and direct as a TV miniseries. He put Steele to work on research, then asked her to take on more responsibility. "At first I didn't want to do it," she demurred, daunted by the scale and projected length of the project. "I thought it was too much. Five years? No thank you. You're never home, you can't get any consistency in your life, you can't have a personal life." But Curtis, Wouk and screenwriter Earl Wallace persuaded her to come aboard for pre-production only. In for a penny, in for a pound — Steele spent five years working on the 15-hour, $52. million Winds of War, an epic family drama set against the backdrop of WWII; she eventually earned a producer's credit.

Eyes wide open, Steele signed on for its sequel, the 32-hour, $104. million War and Remembrance(1989); she also played a small role in each film. Steele shared an Emmy Award for War and Remembrance with Curtis. Finally, in 1991, Steele returned to her horror fans. Having worked for Curtis for so many years, she knew that fans were "banging on Dan's door forever to try and revive Dark Shadows." Curtis finally gave in, and he in turn knew better than to ignore the presence of a bona fide horror icon on his payroll.

And so there was Steele in the Dark Shadows revival, slipping into Grayson Hall's old role, Dr. Julia Hoffman, as though it had always been hers. She imagined Hoffman, creator of a serum that could cure vampirism, as "sort of a deranged alchemist," recalling, perhaps, the Fellini role that got away. Despite its color cinematography, handsome production values and Steele's commanding presence, the new Dark Shadows lasted only a year. One more sad bit of proof that you can't go home again.