JULIE ADAMS

(17 October 1926 - 3 February 2019)

The American actress Julie Adams, who has died aged 92, was born in Iowa, grew up in Arkansas and moved to California at age nineteen. Dividing her time between secretarial work and acting lessons, she was spotted by Paramount Pictures for Red, Hot and Blue (1949) with Betty Hutton and Victor Mature. For a while she was in B-westerns for Lippert Productions. As a fairly stunningly beautiful young woman, Adams secured a seven-year contract with Universal-International where she worked with Rock Hudson, Tyrone Power, Glenn Ford and Van Heflin plus James Stewart (with Hudson and Kennedy) in Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River. Following more westerns, including The Lawless Breed and The Man from the Alamo, she subsequently appeared in Jack Arnold’s 3-D horror exploitationer Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). A change of first name to Julia made little difference to her career and she survived as not much more than just eye candy decoration for genre westerns, comedies and crime dramas in such pictures as The Looters, Six Bridges to Cross, The Private War of Major Benson and Slaughter on Tenth Avenue. After that, television came to her rescue . She retired in 2018 following work on a short film, The Lucky Southern Star, based on her own life story. Julie Adams was briefly married to the writer and producer Leonard Stern in the early 1950s and then she married the actor Ray Danton in 1955, with whom she has two sons, Steve and Mitchell. They divorced in 1978 and Danton died in 1992.

MICHAEL DARVELL