Was Dancing Star Juliet Prowse Really Mauled By the Same Jaguar Twice?
Here is the latest in a series of examinations into urban legends related to dancing and dancers and whether they are true or false. Click here to see all of the dancing urban legends featured so far.
DANCING URBAN LEGEND: Juliet Prowse was mauled by the same jaguar twice.
Juliet Prowse was born in India to a British father and a South African mother. After her father died when she was just a toddler, she moved with her mother to South Africa and soon began studying dance at a young age. She was discovered as a dancer in Paris in her twenties and she was soon a key player in the 1960 film, Can-Can…
Prowse starred in her own sitcom a few years later after some more film roles, where she plays an actress who marries a guy in the Air Force and they try to live on his salary while she continues working as an actress.
She became a popular entertainer in Las Vegas, as her dancing was excellent and her long legs were so famous that she even starred in commercials about her legs for hosiery products in the 1970s and 1980s…
Starting in the late 1970s, a popular recurring TV special was Circus of the Stars. It ran until the early 1990s. Here’s a sample of the 1981 edition…
Naturally, someone like Juliet Prowse would be perfect for a thing like that (she was up for pretty much anything. She guest-hosted The Muppet Show in its first season and she was on a number of episode of Hollywood Squares) and she was set to appear in the 1987 edition of the Circus of Stars (she was 51 at the time). However, while rehearsing for the program, on September 28th, 1987, the jaguar in her act (“Uncaged animals”) attacked her, biting into the artery in her neck.
She survived that attack well enough, but then, in December of that year, she was set to appear on The Tonight Show to promote the airing of the Circus of the Stars and the dang thing attacked her again! This time it cut her up so bad that they had to reattach her ear!
Things were resolved, but can you even imagine being bitten by the SAME jaguar TWICE as a performer in the freakin’ Circus of the Stars?!
The legend is…
STATUS: True
Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com.
