THE mummified remains of Hollywood sex symbol and Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers have been found in her rundown Beverly Hills home.

The corpse of the 82-year-old actress was found close to a pile of unopened fan mail after lying undiscovered for up to a year.

Vickers, the star of 1958 horror classic Attack of the 50ft Woman, was found by a neighbour who pushed through a mountain of letters to find the body next to a heater which was still running.

“We’ve all been crying about this,” Susan Savage said. “Nobody should be left alone like that.

“She kept to herself, had friends and seemed very independent.”

She was born Yvette Vedder in Kansas City, Missouri, to jazz musicians Charles Vedder and his wife Iola.

Her first film role was an uncredited cameo in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film noir classic Sunset Boulevard, but didn’t make her big screen debut under her own name until she appeared in Short Cut to Hell in 1957.

She was spotted and picked for the part by Jimmy Cagney. But the role for which she was most remembered was as Honey Parker in Attack of the 50ft Woman, where she played the voluptuous mistress of the lead character’s husband.

The following year she was named Playboy’s Miss July 1959 and her centrefold photos were shot by Russ Meyer, a key figure in the world of B-movies.

She was rumoured to have had affairs with Hollywood leading men Lee Marvin and Cary Grant in 1961, and two years later was given a role in the acclaimed Paul Newman film Hud, only to have most of her scenes cut when Newman’s wife Joanne Woodward objected to the onscreen chemistry between Yvette and her husband.

Her screen career never again reached those heights. She enjoyed some success as a stage actress and released a jazz CD as a tribute to her parents, but in the 1970s she began working as an estate agent to supplement her income.

She was briefly married twice during the 1950s.