One of the first she made after this was Girls! Girls! Girls!, in which she played Robin, a night club singer "hung up" on Elvis. Along the way she sings (parts of) "Never Let Me Go", "The Nearness of You", and "Baby, Baby, Baby".

She made a bigger impression the next year as Miss Purty in The Nutty Professor with Jerry Lewis. "At last I've established a position," she said. "That's the first step. Most of all, I want to be singled out." The critics certainly singled her out in The Courtship Of Eddie's Father, that same year. Opposite Glenn Ford, she put in a fine performance as Dollye Dailey. As Ian and Elizabeth Cameron wrote in Dames, "Stella Stevens is adept at playing the wide-eyed innocents who leave behind them a trail of confusion, consternation, or embarrassment.

She did this particularly well in The Courtship Of Eddie's Father." Her starring roles in feature films continued through the sixties, playing opposite Dean Martin in the first Matt Helm vehicle, The Silencers, and with Rosalind Russell in Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows in 1968.

The seventies started off pretty good with Stella in one of her finest performances as the kind-hearted prostitute opposite Jason Robards in Peckinpah's The Ballad of Cable Hogue. She was a prostitute once again in the disaster film The Poseidon Adventure in 1971. The first of the Irwin Allen all-star disaster films, it was a huge hit at the box office, but it was about the last we would see of Stella in "major motion pictures". Since then, she seems to have made about a dozen "B" movies a year (and TV-movies). Enough, at least to warrant a "Stella Week" on the USA Network about twice a year... (if I were running things!) Although not necessarily tops with the critics, these kinds of films provide steady work. (Take a look at her entry on the IMDB if you doubt it!) She had expressed a desire to direct as early as 1964, but it doesn't seem to be happening yet. Her son, Andrew Stevens, on the other hand, has worn the hat of director, producer, screenwriter, as well as actor, in a steady stream of the same kinds of films.

Last I heard, Stella made a live action sequence for the video game Phantasmagoria! This will be eclipsed in the not-too-distant-future, of course, by "Elvis' Virtual Women"!!