‘Creature From the Black Lagoon’ star Julie Adams dead at age 92
A Universal Monsters film star, Julie Adams, has passed away at the age of 92.
Her son Mitch Danton told The Hollywood Reporter that Adams died early Sunday morning in in Los Angeles, California.
While her legacy is the co-starring role in Creature From the Black Lagoon, Adams was less enamored with the film.
“I thought, ‘The creature from what? What is this?'” Adams said in a 2013 interview for the Horror Society, “because I had been working with some major stars and so on. But I read it and said, ‘If I turn it down, I won’t get paid and I’ll be on suspension.’ And then I thought, ‘What the hay! It might be fun.’ And of course, indeed it was. It was a great pleasure to do the picture.”
Adams offered one reason why the first film remains so popular. “I think the best thing about the picture is that we do feel for the creature. We feel for him and his predicament,” she said.
Adams also starred with Donald O’Connor in Francis Joins the WACS (1954), played opposite Elvis Presley in Tickle Me (1965) and appeared with Dennis Hopper in The Last Movie (1971) and with John Wayne in McQ (1974).
Fans of Murder, She Wrote know Adams for playing the realtor Eve Simpson on the long-running Angela Lansbury starrer, and in the early 1970s, she portrayed Jimmy Stewart’s wife in the legendary actor’s first foray into starring on his own series.
As a publicity stunt, Universal Studios once declared her legs “the most perfectly symmetrical in the world” and insured them for $125,000. And in “The Case of the Deadly Verdict,” a 1963 episode of Perry Mason, Adams’ character had the notable distinction of being one of the lawyer’s few clients to be found guilty.
