JAN STERLING came from a distinguished New York family. She was reputedly descended from the second US President, John Adams, and was privately and expensively educated in Europe. But it was as gangsters’ molls, blowsy prostitutes and tough, hard-bitten women that the busty blonde made her mark in the Fifties, in a string of films noir such as Appointment with Danger and such sensational titles as Women’s Prison, The Female Animal and High School Confidential!

She won an Oscar nomination as a terrified passenger in the John Wayne airborne drama The High and the Mighty (1954), but her best film was probably Ace in the Hole (1951), in which Kirk Douglas’s has-been reporter plays with the life of a man trapped underground, spinning out his predicament to get his big story. He meets his match in cynicism in the man’s wife, played by Sterling, who will do almost anything for publicity and a quick buck, though she refuses to be photographed praying. “Kneeling bags my nylons,” she explains. She has another of film noir’s great lines when she says: “I’ve seen a lot of hard-boiled eggs in my time, but you, you’re 20 minutes.” 

In his autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, Douglas recalled that in one scene he had to choke Sterling with a fur stole. Sterling had to signal if it was too much. Douglas carried on strangling her until she turned blue, but there was never any signal. He released her and she dropped to the ground. But it was not from dedication to the task that she had not signalled. “I couldn’t,” she told him. “You were choking me.” 

The critics Julie Kirgo and Elizabeth Ward praised Sterling in the book Film Noir:“In contrast to Douglas’s ‘big’ performance, Sterling’s is quiet and subtle, conveyed by the obsequious look of her saucer eyes, in the twist of her pouting mouth and in the brassy tone of her voice.” 

She was born Jane Sterling Adriance in 1921, and acted on the London stage and on Broadway, playing posh English women, before going to Hollywood, where she appeared as Jane Adrian. But she had opted for Jan Sterling by the time she won her first significant film role, as the wife of a man who rapes a deaf mute girl in Johnny Belinda (1948).

During the Fifties she worked with some of cinema’s biggest stars, including William Holden in Union Station, Charlton Heston in Pony Express, Robert Mitchum in Man with the Gun and Humphrey Bogart in The Harder They Fall.

In later decades she turned up only very occasionally in films, including First Monday in October (1981), in which she played Walter Matthau’s wife. She continued to appear regularly on television throughout the Sixties and Seventies, on such programmes as The Untouchables, Bonanza, Naked City, Hawaii Five-O and Little House on the Prairie. She was married to the actors John Merivale, in the Forties, and Paul Douglas, throughout the Fifties. 

After Douglas’s death, she was the longtime companion of Sam Wanamaker, until his death in 1993. Her son Adams Douglas, named after her famous ancestors, died a few months ago.

Jan Sterling, actress, was born on April 3, 1921. She died on March 26, 2004, aged 82.