Jan Sterling was born "Jane Sterling Adriance" in Woodland Hills, California. She grew up in London and Paris. In the wonderful 1950 women-in-prison film Caged, she plays a prostitute named "Smoochie." She walks down a stairway in Mystery Street (1950) and ends up a DOA. She's a gangster's girl in Union Station (1950) and Humphrey Bogart's wife in The Harder They Fall (1956). Her husband is a doomed longshoreman in Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1957). In Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole (1951), her husband is doomed in a cave-in. There is a wonderful scene in The High and the Mighty (1954) where Jan, playing a passenger in a doomed airliner, decides to scrub off all of her age-concealing makeup and start leading a cleaner life. It's a brave scene for any Hollywood actress. In Female on the Beach (1955), she gets Joan Crawford in trouble. In The Female Animal (1958), she tries to get Hedy Lamarr in trouble. In her later years, she turned to television and the stage. All in all, Jan Sterling was a marvelous actress.
Happy birthday, Jan!
Happy Birthday, indeed! I'm currently running a line from Ace in the Hole on my blog profile. In the movie it's delivered as only she could: "I don't pray. Kneeling bags my nylons."
ReplyDeletegod, I hadn't thought about her in Caged in quite some time but she stole every scene she was in.