Kirsten Lindholm (born Kirsten Lindholm Andreassen; 1 September 1943) is a former model and a film actress known for her roles in Hammer horror movies, in which she first appeared as Kirsten Betts. She is now a yoga instructor and performer currently living in New Zealand and is now known as Elandra Kirsten Meredith and by the Sikh religious name Vikram Kaur Khalsa (Punjabi: ਵਿਕਰਮ ਕੌਰ ਖਾਲਸਾ).
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as Kirsten Betts and then Kirsten Lindholm, she was an actress and model. She appeared in a London play called Pyjama Tops (1969),[4] in the movie Zeta One (1969),[5] and then in four Hammer horror movies: The Vampire Lovers (1970),[6][7] in which her character is beheaded before the opening titles and during filming for which she appeared as one of a "[v]ampire quintet" on the cover of ABC Film Review,[8]Crescendo (1970),[9]Twins of Evil (1971),[10] where her role has been cited as an example of psychological violence,[11] and Lust for a Vampire (1971).[2][12][13]
At a yoga class in England, she met Vic Briggs, who had converted to Sikhism and taken the name Vikram Singh; they fell in love and married after moving to California, and she took the Sikh religious name Vikram Kaur Khalsa.[14][15][16] They ran a Sikh ashram in San Diego.[14] After living in Hawaii, where she worked as a healing practitioner[14] and founded Ho'omana Ke Laka Healing workshops,[2][3] she and her husband moved in 2008 to the Hibiscus Coast, New Zealand, where they both taught yoga.[17] She also sang backup for her husband on his One in the Goddess album.[3] Briggs died in 2021.[1]
^Denis Meikle and Christopher T. Koetting, A History of Horrors: The Rise and Fall of the House of Hammer, Filmmakers Series 51, Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow, 1996, ISBN978-0-8108-2959-6, p. 253.
^Bobb Cotter, Ingrid Pitt, Queen of Horror: The Complete Career, Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010, ISBN978-0-7864-5888-2, p. 128.