Carol Thurston (September 27, 1920 – December 31, 1969) was an American film and television actress who played the fictitious Emma Clanton in eight episodes (1959-1961) of the ABC/Desilu western television series, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, starring Hugh O'Brian as frontier peace officer Wyatt Earp.

Biography

Thurston was married three times. By her first husband, David S. Thayer, she had a daughter, Amanda Lycklyn (born February 29, 1948). Five years her senior, Thayer was a commercial pilot and a former lieutenant colonel in the United States Air Force. He played football at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas. The couple married in 1947 in Yuma, Arizona, and divorced two years later. Early in 1954, Thayer crashed a converted bomber owned by the Fullerton Oil Company into a residential district in Burbank, California. Though Thayer escaped with bruises, cuts, and shock, a man alseep in an apartment largely destroyed by flames suffered critical burns. Thayer thereafter became an oil operator and died in his native Houston in 1965 at the age of forty-seven.

In 1950, Thurston and actor Ross Elliott became engaged, even going so far as to set the date, November 23. That date came and went, however, without incident; less than three weeks later, the wedding was called off. In July 1956, Thurston embarked on her second marriage; this time, to television actor John Russo (1925–2003, known variously as John Duke, Barry Russo, J.D. Russo, and John Duke Russo). By 1959, the two had become estranged, and by February of that year, Thurston was dating actor Jay Douglas (1907-1996). By January 1960, notwithstanding the fact that neither party had as of yet even initiated divorce proceedings, each spouse was clearly otherwise engaged – Russo (aka Duke), with actress Dolores Michaels; Thurston, with screenwriter Robert Creighton Williams. Eventually, the divorce was finalized, and, on February 7, 1962, Thurston and Williams were wed. So they would remain until Thurston's suicide, at the age of forty-nine, on New Year's Eve 1969. She was survived by her husband, who died in 1976 at the age of fifty-two, her daughter, and a grandson.

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