Luan Peters (born 18 June 1946, Bethnal Green, London), also known as Karol Keyes, is an English actress and singer.

Biography

Born as Carol Hirsch, she made her stage debut in a pantomime aged four, then went on to win a drama scholarship at age 16 after a performance of Twelfth Night.

She started singing in a band for £2 a night as a way of earning extra money while attending drama school. Her singing career began in Manchester, where under the name Karol Keyes (named after her management Keystone Promotions), she fronted “Karol Keyes and the Big Sound”, a band previously known as “The Fat Sound”. One of her first records was an Ike & Tina Turner number called "A Fool in Love" on Columbia. She left that band in June 1966. A year later, she joined Joan Littlewood’s drama school at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

In 1970, she starred in the 13-part television series Go Girl, as a go-go dancer who finds herself involved in action-oriented story lines. The series was beset by problems, which included the financiers backing out, the production running out of money, and the actors' union closing the production down. The series was never broadcast. The pilot episode only saw the light of day more than a decade after it was made, when it was released twice on UK video in the early 1980s - once under the title Give Me a Ring Sometime (which is actually just the pilot episode title) and on the second occasion as Passport to Murder.

Peters is known for her appearances in Hammer horror films of the 1970s such as Lust for a Vampire and Twins of Evil. Other film credits include Man of Violence, Freelance, Not Tonight Darling, The Flesh and Blood Show, Vampira, Land of the Minotaur, The Wildcats of St Trinian's and Pacific Banana.

Her stage work includes A Man Most Likely To (1969, with George Cole), Pyjama Tops (1969), Decameron 73 (1973), playing Linda McCartney in John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert (1974), Tom Stoppard's Dirty Linen (1976), Shut Your Eyes And Think Of England! (1978) and Funny Peculiar (1985).

She was also active on television in series such as: Z-Cars, Public Eye, Doctor Who (in the serials Frontier in Space and The Macra Terror), Target, The Professionals and the Fawlty Towers episode The Psychiatrist playing Raylene Miles, an Australian tourist. Her last known television role was in an episode in The Bill in 1990. In 2005 she was interviewed for the documentary Fawlty Towers Revisited.

In 1975 she fronted the band 5000 Volts and appeared on Top of the Pops singing their hit song “I’m on Fire”; however, the actual vocalist was Tina Charles. Peters continued to release singles (mainly in Europe) throughout the decade.