John Frankenheimer said Dina Merrill was the worst actress he'd ever wor

You're right; he was. I posted this before I looked it up. I should have remembered this detail because I once read the 1986 Barbara Hutton biography by C. David Heymann, but recalled that Mrs. Post had at least five husbands. I couldn't remember that E.F. Hutton was Dina's father not her step-father. However, I have to agree with the Director John Frankenheimer that Merrill was not a good actress, just a classy, beautiful socialite. No wonder they typecast her. She was okay in Butterfield 8, but next to Elizabeth Taylor (in the worst role of her career, I might add) she seemed sub-mediocre. This made Taylor's below par performance as an upscale hooker shine brighter when she didn't deserve an Oscar, much less a nomination.

But: there have been even worse so-called actresses, namely Sue Lyon, Carole Lynley, and, I hate to say it, Ali MacGraw, who was too old (30!) for the part in Love Story but could still pass as a College co-ed. These days any thirty-year-old could play a college babe. The green-eyed, blonde Lyon is only tolerable in Lolita because she was so beautiful and her co-stars were some of the greatest talents in filmdom: James Mason, Shelley Winters, and Peter Sellers, all under the direction of the equally great Stanley Kubrick, who must have felt the tiresome compulsion to re-take many of Sue Lyon's scenes. I'm certain Frankenheimer saw the need to do the same during the filming of The Young Savages. But let's give Lyon the benefit of our doubts: she was barely fifteen when they filmed Lolita, while Merrill was a seasoned actress in her thirties.

Some of these performances are so awful to behold that they make even Linda Blair, a not very good actress either, look like a solid-gold Oscar nominee, which she once was (for 1973's biggest film The Exorcist). Blair was only fourteen at the time and lost the Best Supporting Actress Award that year (March 1974) to ten-year-old Tatum O'Neal for Paper Moon. Too bad neither actress has appeared in anything decent since O'Neal's A-list turn in the 1976 blockbuster The Bad News Bears.

As for Dina Merrill, she still looks great (much better than any other show-business woman in her age group with the exception of maybe Ann Blyth and Barbara Rush) and is still loaded to the gills. More power to her.