The famed star of films like ‘Girls! Girls! Girls!’ and ‘The Nutty Professor’ is the subject of a detailed profile directed by her son, Andrew Stevens.

Andrew Stevens pays loving but not hagiographic tribute to his late mother, famed actress Stella Stevens, in his documentary recently showcased at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. The film convincingly makes the case that its subject, best known for her performances in such pictures as The Poseidon Adventure and The Nutty Professor, is severely underrated, both as an actress and social activist. Stella Stevens: The Last Starlet aims to rectify that perception and, thanks to numerous clips of her work and effusive commentary by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Vivica A. Fox, it succeeds beautifully.

Stevens was soon signed to 20th Century Fox, where she was groomed to be a starlet in the mold of Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren. Her sexpot image was further confirmed when she appeared as a Playboy centerfold, though she had desperately tried to purchase the nude images back from Hugh Hefner, who refused.

“Some of the most fun parts I’ve played are nymphomaniacs,” Stevens amusingly points out in one of many interviews featured here. Some of them are shown via archival clips from various talk show appearances, while others are recreated using a lookalike actress (Lindsie Kongsore). While the device is jarring at first, it admittedly breathes life into Stevens’ words. But the filmmaker gets too carried away with it at times, as when he unnecessarily uses an actor to play a film critic reading an excerpt from a review.

There are plenty of juicy anecdotes and revelations in the documentary, one of the most priceless being Stevens’ account of co-star Bobby Darin getting a much noticeable erection while they shot a kissing scene. She also reveals that she had no desire to appear with Elvis Presley in Girls! Girls! Girls! and only agreed to do it after she was promised that she would get to play opposite Montgomery Clift in her next film. The Clift project never materialized, and she could never bring herself to watch the Presley one.

We learn of her many romances, including an affair with the notorious and very much married Hollywood fixer Sidney Korshak and a lengthy relationship with actor Skip Ward, who took financial advantage of her and was frequently unfaithful.

She later became an iconic figure for Black audiences, thanks to her groundbreaking interracial love scene with Jim Brown in the blaxploitation hit Slaughter and her campy villainous turn in Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold. But what she really wanted to do, as they say, was direct. She finally got her chance in 1989 with an indie feature called The Ranch, starring her son Andrew (he later returned the favor, directing her in the 1991 B-movie The Terror Within II), and a feminist-themed documentary, The American Heroine, which was never released.

Besides the ample clips from her roles and television appearances, the documentary includes fascinating home movies, personal photographs, and insightful commentary from various figures including film historians Leonard Maltin and Courtney Joyner. But it’s Tarantino who unsurprisingly proves the highlight, articulately gushing about Stevens’ performances with the passion of a true fan. (Introducing The Last Starlet at the festival, Andrew admitted that he basically handed the ball to Tarantino and let him run with it.)

While Stevens’ big-screen career eventually fizzled, she never stopped working, appearing in dozens of direct-to-video movies and TV series until her final appearance in something called Megaconda in 2010. “If the idea of being an actress is to work, she worked. She worked a lot,” Tarantino points out.