In Remembrance: Jan Sterling

     Jan Sterling, Oscar-nominated actress and B-movie "bad girl" beauty, died on March 26, 2004. She was 82.

     Sterling was born Jane Sterling Adriance in Manhattan on 1921 to a well-to-do family. After her mother’s remarriage, the family relocated to Europe where she was schooled by private tutors in London and Paris. She acquired a strong accent and was enrolled, at age 15, into Fay Compton’s dramatic school in London. Sterling possessed a reckless independence and a passion for acting and by age 17 she returned to Manhattan to conquer Broadway. Over the next 11 years, she continually played the role of the proper British woman.  

     She worked with Ruth Gordon in 1942 in Ruth’s play Over 21. During this time, Gordon suggested that she change her name and the two agreed upon Jan Sterling. Sterling would soon hit her peak as a stage actress when she was cast to replace Judy Holliday as Billie Dean in Chicago’s Born Yesterday, the hit play directed by Gordon. Her stage success was beginning to create some talk in Hollywood.

     The first major film break for Sterling was in 1948’s Johnny Belinda, supporting Best Actress Oscar winner, Jane Wyman. From then on, Hollywood helped Sterling shed away the proper-woman persona and excel at playing the ditz or the cheap floozy. She was marvelous as the “ditzy gal” Smoochie in the campy ‘women-behind-bars’ flick Caged (1950) and held her own against William Holden in Union Station. Columbia Pictures held Sterling in high regard and had her test for the 1950 film version of Born Yesterday but she lost the role to the star she replaced in Chicago, Judy Holliday. Holliday went on to win the Best Actress Oscar for the film.

     In 1950, Sterling was only beginning to hone her craft and would begin finding roles as the hardened tramp or down-on-her-luck sultry dame. These roles were a staple in the film noir genre and fit her bad girl persona. The sexy, buxom blonde would star in some of the best Film Noir dramas. She was superb in 1950’s Mystery Street, and 1951’s Appointment with Danger opposite Alan Ladd. Her other credits include 1952’s Flesh and Fury, with Tony Curtis and Dick Powell’s directorial debut, Split Second (1953). As the bad girl she peaked with films like The Human Jungle (1954), Female on the Beach (1955), with Joan Crawford and played wife to Humphrey Bogart in 1956’s The Harder They Fall.

     Sterling’s performances did not go unrecognized. She won the National Board of Review Award for the Billy Wilder film Ace in the Hole (1951) as Lorraine, the conniving wife of a cave-in victim caught in reporter Kirk Douglas’s human interest story.  Sterling was also nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in the 1954 John Wayne thriller The High and the Mighty, but won a Golden Globe instead.

     Movie roles became sparse for Sterling in the late 1950’s, but she’s well remembered for starring in the 1958 cult classic melodrama, High School Confidential. After the death of her first husband of nine years, Paul Douglas, in 1959, Sterling appeared in the 1960’s in only a handful of films.

     In the early 1970’s, she had a strong relationship with Sam Wanamaker. They never married, but they lived together until his death in 1993. Television was her medium of choice in the 1970’s and appeared on such popular shows as Hawaii Five-O, Little House on the Prairie, and Three's Company.

     Sterling's last film was with Walter Matthau in 1981’s First Monday in October.

-John Gibbon