Julie Adams

The Contract That Erased Betty May

Betty May Adams arrived in Hollywood with little more than a beauty queen crown from Little Rock and a contract paying 300 dollars a week. Universal Pictures quickly decided that her name wouldn't sell enough tickets. So they renamed her Julia and, a bit later, Julie to sound younger on the marquees of neighborhood movie theaters.

Before hitting it big, she worked as a secretary while waiting for an opportunity that never seemed to come. Her first credited role came in 1949 in the film The Dalton Gang. During those learning years, she made B-movie westerns almost on an assembly line, because the studio needed to get value out of her fixed salary.

And it worked.

Her look fit the standards of the era, but her voice had a depth that set her apart from other contract actresses. In 1951, she shared the screen with James Stewart in The Bend of the River. That location shoot showed she could keep pace with the biggest leading men without losing her composure under the Oregon sun.

The White Swimsuit and the Water Tank

Most moviegoers remember her for a single image burned into the collective memory of fantasy cinema. In 1954, she starred in Creature from the Black Lagoon. Wearing a white one-piece swimsuit, she swam above a prehistoric creature in a routine that blended eroticism with pure horror.

But the shoot was a physical ordeal for the entire crew. Adams spent hours in murky water with zero visibility, and the cold chilled her to the bone. Universal insured her legs for one million dollars as part of an aggressive publicity campaign meant to mythologize her image before the premiere.

That success was a glass trap.

Despite the worldwide fame brought by the creature from the lagoon, she always preferred her more sober dramatic work. By 1953, she had already proven her range in The Mississippi Gambler alongside Tyrone Power. It was her biggest box-office hit outside the horror genre and the one that paid her bills best during a decade of steady work.

Top-Tier Supporting Roles and Late Memoirs

When the studio system began to crumble in the 1960s, Adams knew how to move into television without looking back. She didn't mind losing her leading-lady status if it meant working every week. She appeared in series such as Perry Mason or The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, with a professionalism that earned her the respect of casting directors.

But Hollywood doesn't forgive age.

In 1971, she had a significant role in The Last Movie under the direction of Dennis Hopper. The shoot in Peru was chaotic and nearly wrecked the careers of everyone involved because of the director's excesses. Adams kept her composure amid the disaster and returned to television to play real estate agent Eve Simpson in Murder, She Wrote across ten episodes between 1987 and 1993.

Her last significant screen appearance came in 2006 in Lost, where she played Amelia in a brief story arc. In 2011, she published her autobiography, The Lucky Southern Star: Reflections From the Black Lagoon, to make sense of her memories of the golden age. Julie Adams died in Los Angeles on February 3, 2019 at the age of 92.