Jan Sterling

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Jan Sterling in the film noir Mystery Street (1950)
Jan Sterling in the film noir Mystery Street (1950)

Jan Sterling (April 3, 1921 – March 26, 2004) was an American actress. She was born Jane Sterling Adriance in New York City, into a prosperous family. Sterling was educated in private schools before heading to Europe with her family. She was schooled by private tutors in London and Paris, and was enrolled in Fay Compton's dramatic school in London.

As a teenager she returned to Manhattan, and billed with such aliases as Jane Adriance and Jane Sterling, began her career by making a Broadway appearance in Bachelor Born, and went on to appear in such major stage offerings as Panama Hattie, Over 21 and Present Laughter. In 1947, she made her movies debut in Tycoon, now billed as Jane Darian. Seldom cast in passive roles, Sterling was at her best in parts calling for hard-bitten, sometimes hard-boiled determination. Actress Ruth Gordon insisted she change her stage name and the two hit upon Jan Sterling.

In 1948 she broke into films as the scheming floozy who tries to take the baby of Academy Award winner Jane Wyman's character in Johnny Belinda, but ultimately ends up helping "Belinda" (Wyman) by clearing her of murder. Shuttling between films and television, she showed up in nearly all the major live anthologies of the 1950s, playing in "bad girl" film roles in Caged (1950), Mystery Street (1950), The Big Carnival (1951), Flesh and Fury (1952), The Human Jungle (1954), and Female on the Beach (1955), while making a more sympathetic impression in Sky Full of Moon (1952).

In 1954 Sterling was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The High and the Mighty. Also the same year, she travelled to England to play the role of Julia in the first film version of George Orwell's 1984, despite being several months pregnant at the time. During the following years, she appeared regularly in movies like Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, Kathy O, and The Female Animal. She retired from films in favor of the stage in 1969 and returned before the cameras in 1979 to portray Lou Henry Hoover in the TV miniseries Backstairs at the White House.

Married and divorced to actor John Merivale in the 1940s, Sterling's career slipped down after the death of her second husband, actor Paul Douglas, in 1959. In the 1970s, she entered into a longlasting personal relationship with the late actor and American expatriate in the UK, Sam Wanamaker, but they never married.

Inactive for nearly two decades, she made an appearance at the Cinecon Film Festival in Los Angeles in the fall of 2001.

After a long bout with diabetes, a broken hip, a series of strokes and the death of her only child, her son, Adams Douglas, who died in 2003, Sterling died in Los Angeles, California, aged 82.

She is interred in the Garden of Actors Churchyard Cemetery in London, England.[citation needed]

[edit] Films

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