Julie Adams

Billed as Julia Adams early on, she spent the 1950s inside the studio system's most reliable production line: westerns. Bright Victory in 1951, then Bend of the River and Horizons West in 1952, the first of those opposite James Stewart. She was born in Waterloo, Iowa in 1926 and worked, on and off, for six decades.

In 1954 she made the film that outlived everything else. As Kay Lawrence in Creature from the Black Lagoon she plays the woman the monster fixates on, and she plays her straight, as a competent professional rather than a screamer, with the result that a rubber-suit picture acquired a romantic melancholy it had no obvious right to.

The rest of the career is television, and there is a great deal of it. Between the late 1950s and the 1980s she guested on nearly every format American TV had: private-eye shows such as 77 Sunset Strip and Checkmate, westerns including Yancy Derringer, Tate and The Alaskans, spy pastiche in The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., anthology drama in Kraft Suspense Theatre, medical series in Marcus Welby, M.D. and The Bold Ones: The New Doctors. She was Paula Denning on the 1980s soap Capitol and, most durably, Eve Simpson on Murder, She Wrote.

Films kept arriving between the guest spots: Vera Radford in Tickle Me, Elaine in McQ, Mrs. Anderson in The Last Movie, Martha in Catchfire. She was still working late, with an appearance in Treme and a voice part in Carnage in 2011. She died in 2019.