The whole picture was supposed to be for my benefit and here it was all going down the drain.When Hughes became aware of the situation, the company was dissolved and Sturges and Ophuls dismissed. Stuart Heisler was hired, primarily to shoot close-ups, before the film was temporarily abandoned. Two years later Hughes, having taken over RKO, shot more footage for the film (now retitled Vendetta), then hired Mel Ferrer (who received sole screen credit as director) to shoot six weeks of retakes. In 1947 Domergue had married the director Hugo Fregonese, and on completion of the film went with him to his native Argentina:The Vendetta experience was still on my mind – all that time and money wasted.

By the time it was all over, I had no drive left, and, to be perfectly frank, I lost my first child because of Vendetta. I had a miscarriage and this was heartbreaking.Domergue returned to Hollywood when Hughes offered her an RKO contract and the lead in John Farrow’s film noir Where Danger Lives, in which Domergue was a psychotic who lets a doctor (Robert Mitchum) believe he killed her husband when in fact she has smothered him herself. “Robert Mitchum was wonderful,” commented Domergue.There was a scene where I was to get hysterical and it was difficult for me After we shot the scene, Robert said to me, “I like you. You don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re in there doingit with all your heart!” There was an enormous publicity campaign for me after I finished the film. I was on practically every cover of every magazine – 15 pages in Pageant, four pages in Life, the cover of Look – you name it.Then, with both my films about to open in New York, I told the studio I couldn’t go there because I was tired, angry and pregnant again. Howard phoned me and told me there was a lot of money tied up in the campaign.

When I told him I was going to have a baby he said, “OK, goodbye Faith”, and that was the last time I ever heard his voice.Where Danger Lives opened to lukewarm response, followed by the heavily panned Vendetta, a wordy and turgid melodrama of Corsican vengeance. “It is not a good film,” confessed Domergue,but we all were quite good. Unfortunately all of the performances that Max and I worked on were out the window. What you see in the final version is bits and pieces of everything – but nothing of what Preston shot at all except a couple of long shots.Domergue was in three minor movies – Don Siegel’s Duel at Silver Creek (1952), Lloyd Bacon’s The Great Sioux Massacre (1953) and Stuart Heisler’s This is My Love (1954) – and travelled extensively with Fregonese, by whom she had two children, before her most significant year in pictures, 1955, when she starred in This Island Earth, It Came From Beneath the Sea and Cult of the Cobra as well as the western Santa Fe Passage (“I don’t think I had one day off in the whole of 1955!”).Considered one of the more intelligent science-fiction tales, Joseph Newman’s This Island Earth (partly directed by Jack Arnold when Newman fell ill) featured Domergue as a scientist shanghaied with her colleagues to the alien planet Metaluna to help defend it from invasion.