Dawn Bender

Dawn Bender is alive and well and recently retired from the LA Public School System where she has been a teacher since the early 1960s. She has no idea how the rumor of her death started and several requests to IMDB to eliminate her erroneous death date have gone unanswered. Remember: just because something is listed on IMDB doesn't mean it's accurate.

And to correct an earlier post, she and Warren Vanders (Vandershuit) were students at Pepperdine Unversity. Dawn was a child actor in movies and most famously on the radio in the hit series One Man's Family. By the time she made Teenagers in 1957 (the film was released in 1959), she had married Jerry Anderson and was ready to give up acting to raise a family. She agreed to play Betty because a number of actor friends were helping Tom Graeff get his low budget science fiction movie, originally called "Killers from Outer Space," made. Dawn thought Tom was a UCLA student making the film as his thesis, a falsehood that Graeff, five years out of college and the director of three previous films, did nothing to disspell in order to get actors and locations for free. Dawn used Anderson as her last name because she knew the film was non-union and she didn't want any trouble from SAG.

I've been researching Tom Graeff and the making of Teenagers from Outer Space for a while now and it's amazing to discover that almost everything written about Tom and Teenagers is completely wrong.

Guess anyone wanting the real story will have to wait until I finish writing my book.