Mara Corday, who was menaced by a huge hairy spider in the cult horror film Tarantula and appeared in several films thanks to Clint Eastwood, whom she called a “godsend,” has died. She was 95.

Corday died Feb. 9 at her home in Valencia, California, according to a death certificate filed with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health that was obtained by The Washington Post. The cause was arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease.

A onetime contract player at Universal-International, Corday also worked in many Westerns, among them Drums Across the River (1954), starring Audie Murphy; King Vidor’s Man Without a Star (1955), starring Kirk Douglas; and The Quiet Gun (1957), starring Forrest Tucker.

She said she was especially proud of her turn as a fun-loving French girl in the Technicolor romantic musical comedy So This Is Paris (1954), directed by Richard Quine and starring Tony Curtis and Gloria DeHaven.

Corday was married to actor Richard Long (Bourbon Street Beat, 77 Sunset Strip, The Big Valley, Nanny and the Professor) from 1957 until his death in 1974 at age 47 from heart problems.

In the Jack Arnold-directed Tarantula (1955), also starring John Agar, Corday portrays the lab assistant Stephanie “Steve” Clayton, who comes to Arizona to work for a scientist (Leo G. Carroll) who has developed an artificial super-nutrient through radioactivity that sparks extraordinary, rapid growth.

“There’s not much of a plot,” Corday said in an interview for Tom Weaver’s 1996 book It Came From Horrorwood. “You’re at the mercy of the ‘fright,’ the ‘horror,’ or whatever. You’re at the mercy of the special effects people, because if they don’t do a good job, then the whole picture goes in the toilet. For instance, The Giant Claw!”

Yes, Corday starred in that monster movie about a giant bird and in another one also released in 1957, The Black Scorpion.

When Eastwood, a fellow Universal contract player who had bit parts in Man Without a Star and (as a jet fighter pilot) in Tarantula, became a big star, he got Corday work in The Gauntlet (1977), Sudden Impact (1983), Pink Cadillac (1989) and her last film, The Rookie (1990).

In the 1983 film, she played the coffee shop waitress who puts way too much sugar in Dirty Harry’s coffee, then gets held at gunpoint by a bad guy.

“My buddy! One of my closest, dearest friends — a godsend!” she said of Eastwood in a 1996 chat for the Western Clippings website. “When my [SAG] insurance ran out, he put me in The Gauntlet. Then my insurance was OK. When it ran out again, he put me in Sudden Impact. I was the hostage — and it’s here that Clint said the famous line, ‘Make my day!’”

Marilyn Joan Watts was born in Santa Monica on Jan. 3, 1930. She worked as an usherette at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles, then was hired by the Earl Carroll Revue in Hollywood when she was 17. She spent about two years there, going from showgirl to acting in sketches with vaudeville legend Pinky Lee.

She took Mara from a nickname given to her by a bongo player and Corday from a perfume and signed with top Hollywood agent Paul Kohner, who got her on TV in The Adventures of Kit Carson and Craig Kennedy, Criminologist and in films including Two Tickets to Broadway (1951) and Problem Girls (1953).

The exotic actress signed with Universal for $175 a week and appeared in Yankee Pasha (1954), Playgirl (1954) — that’s where she first met Long — Francis Joins the WACS (1954), Foxfire (1955) and Arnold’s The Man From Bitter Ridge (1955).

After she left Universal — she and Mamie Van Doren had received the most fan mail of all the contract players at the studio, she said — she starred in Naked Gun (1956), Raw Edge (1956), A Day of Fury (1956), Undersea Girl (1957) and Girls on the Loose (1958) and appeared in Playboy magazine.

She followed with guest shots on several TV Westerns, including The Restless Gun, Tales of Wells Fargo, Wanted: Dead or Alive and Laramie.

After Long’s first wife, actress Suzan Ball, died of cancer in 1955 at age 22, Corday and Long wed in Las Vegas in January 1957. “I thought when we married we would make a great showbiz team, but Richard didn’t want me in the business,” she said.

She noted that she had roles sewn up in the films Night Passage (1957) and The Oregon Trail (1959) and on a 1966 episode of The Big Valley, but Long torpedoed those. She eventually abandoned her acting career and raised their three kids, Carey, Valerie and Greg.

“Richard Long was an enigma,” Corday said in her Western Clippings interview. “I divorced him 10 times the first year of our marriage, getting a lawyer and everything … and 13 times the second year. He’d plead — literally on his hands and knees, ‘Please forgive me, I don’t know why I did it, give me another chance.’ I loved him and I am still in love with him — 22 years after his death.”