Jan Sterling (April 3, 1921 – March 26, 2004) was an Academy Award-nominated and Golden Globe-winning American actress.
She was born Jane Sterling Adriance in New York City, into a well-to-do 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.
She entered films with a prominent supporting role in Johnny Belinda (1948). Shuttling between films and television, she appeared in nearly all the major live anthologies of the 1950s, playing in film roles in Caged (1950), Mystery Street (1950), The Mating Season (1951), Ace in the Hole (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. In late 1968, she began portraying the role of conniving 'Miss Foss' in the long-running CBS soap, "The Guiding Light." 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 began to slip after the death of her second husband, actor Paul Douglas, in 1959. In the 1970s, she entered into a long-lasting 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, son Adams Douglas, in 2003, Sterling died in 2004 in Los Angeles, California, aged 82.
She is interred in the Garden of Actors Churchyard Cemetery in London, England.
Films
Tycoon (1947)
Johnny Belinda (1948)
Caged (1950)
The Skipper Surprised His Wife (1950)
Mystery Street (1950)
Union Station (1950)
The Mating Season (1951)
Appointment with Danger (1951)
Ace in the Hole (1951)
Rhubarb (1951)
Flesh and Fury (1952)
Sky Full of Moon (1952)
Split Second (1953)
The Vanquished (1953)
Pony Express (1953)
Alaska Seas (1954)
The High and the Mighty (1954)
Return From the Sea (1954)
The Human Jungle (1954)
Women's Prison (1955)
Female on the Beach (1955)
Man with the Gun (1955)
1984 (1956)
The Harder They Fall (1956)
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (1957)
The Female Animal (1958)
High School Confidential! (1958)
Kathy O' (1958)
Love in a Goldfish Bowl (1961)
The Incident (1967)
The Angry Breed (1968)
The Minx (1969)
Sammy Somebody (1976)
First Monday in October (1981)
Awards
Preceded by
Grace Kelly
for Mogambo
Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture
1955
for The High and the Mighty
Succeeded by
Marisa Pavan
for The Rose Tattoo
External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related to:
Jan Sterling
Jan Sterling at the Internet Movie Database
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Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sterling"
Categories: American film actors | American stage actors | American television actors | Hollywood Walk of Fame | People from New York City | Deaths from diabetes | 1921 births | 2004 deaths | Deaths from strokeHidden categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since March 2007
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