Jane Adams Biography

A graduate of Juilliard and a former member of the famed Pasadena Playhouse, diminutive American screen actress Jane Adams (born Betty Jane Bierce) is mainly remembered as the most beautiful of all Universal's monster creations, the hunchbacked Nina of House of Dracula (1945). It was really a pity that the studio should promote Adams as merely one of the ghoulish attractions in this monster-rally, especially since the deformed and self-sacrificing nurse offered the sensationalistic horror opus its one genuine character. She was rather more conventionally cast in yet another horror film, The Brute Man (1946), starring real life acromegalia victim Rondo Hatton, but this low-budget effort proved so poor that Universal ended up unloading it to Poverty Row company PRC. Sporting a new moniker, Poni Adams, she also appeared opposite the studio's resident B-Western star, Kirby Grant but was back to Jane for Lost City of the Jungle (1946), a rough-and-tumble serial noted as the swan song of veteran villain Lionel Atwill. She was Vicky Vale in yet another serial, 1949's Batman and Robin, but did mostly television thereafter. Except for appearances at various classic film fairs, Adams retired completely from show business in 1953 in order to travel with her husband, Major General Thomas Turnage, later an advisor to President Ronald Reagan. - Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi

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