Film, TV actress known for being seized by ‘Black Lagoon’ creature
Julie Adams, a Hollywood film and television actress for more than six decades widely remembered as the terrorized swimmer in the 1954 cult classic “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” died Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 92.
Her death was confirmed by her son Steve Danton.
A lithe beauty from Arkansas — she was Miss Little Rock of 1946 — Adams subdued her Southern drawl, got into the movies in 1949 and appeared in about 50 feature films with a who’s who of leading men, including Charlton Heston, Glenn Ford, Tony Curtis and Elvis Presley.
Her starring breakthrough under a long-term contract with Universal International Pictures was Anthony Mann’s “Bend of the River” (1952), in which she played a frontier woman who falls for James Stewart on the Oregon Trail. It was one of the top box-office hits of the year.
She was seen on more than 90 series, including “The Rifleman,” “Bonanza” and “Perry Mason” in the 1960s; “Mannix” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.” in the ‘70s; “Capitol” in the ‘80s; and “Murder, She Wrote” (1987-93), on which she played a real estate agent and friend of the show’s central character, writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher, played by Angela Lansbury.
In a retrospective interview with film historian Tom Weaver in 1991, Adams voiced no serious regrets, although she noted, “No matter what you do, you can act your heart out, but people will always say, ‘Oh, Julie Adams — “Creature From the Black Lagoon.”’”
Like the title character in the classic 1933 movie “King Kong,” the creature is a proud, sensitive monster who falls in love at first sight. In a lost world up the Amazon, the creature lurks in the depths as Kay Lawrence (Adams) and two scientists (Richard Carlson and Richard Denning) chug upstream on an expedition aboard their laboratory boat.
In a white one-piece bathing suit, Kay takes a swim in a murky lagoon as the creature stalks her with backstrokes from below.
She was born Betty May Adams in Waterloo, Iowa, on Oct. 17, 1926, but grew up in Blytheville and Little Rock, Ark. After being named Miss Little Rock, she dropped out at 19 and went to Hollywood, resolved to be an actress.
She married screenwriter Leonard Stern in 1951; they divorced in 1953. She married film director Ray Danton in 1954. They had two sons before they, too, were divorced. She is survived by her sons and four grandchildren.