| Interment Location | Visited | |
|---|---|---|
| Arlington, VA | April 18, 2024 |
Jane Adams’s acting career was brief, but in her eleven years of Hollywood work she compiled a list of performances that included roles in movies, film serials, and television episodes alike. Adams retired in 1953 and lived another six decades. She died in 2014 and was buried under the name Betty Jane Turnage in Section 7A of Arlington National Cemetery.
Adams studied at the Pasadena Playhouse and performed with Lux Radio Theatre before she debuted as a screen actress in a 1942 short film titled, So You Want to Give Up Smoking. In 1945, having signed a contract with Universal Pictures, she appeared with John Carradine and Lon Chaney, Jr. in House of Dracula as Nina, the hunchbacked assistant to Onslow Stevens’s Doctor Franz Edelmann. She featured prominently in Universal’s 13-part film serial Lost City of the Jungle from 1946. Three years later she acted with Robert Lowery and John Duncan in the 15-part New Adventures of Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder, produced by Columbia Pictures. Adams played journalist Vicki Vale, a character who first appeared in Batman comics mere months prior, in 1948. Among her final gigs was a 1953 episode of the George Reeves-led Adventures of Superman television series. In some of her earliest credited roles she was listed as “Poni Adams.”
Adams was wed in 1940 to J.C.H. Smith, who went on to serve as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy during World War II. In September 1942, Smith’s vessel, the USS Wasp (CV-7), was struck by Japanese torpedoes and its wreckage scuttled. He was declared dead a year later. In 1945 Adams married again, this time to veteran Thomas K. Turnage. He later served in the Korean War and rose through the ranks of the Army National Guard to become a major general in 1974. President Ronald Reagan nominated Turnage to lead the Selective Service System in 1981 and the Veterans Administration in 1986. He was the last official to head the Veterans Administration before it became the cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs in 1989. He died in 2000, and Adams outlived him by more than 13 years. Adams and General Turnage are memorialized on opposite faces of a shared gravestone.
Fast Facts
Born: August 7, 1918 in San Antonio, Texas
Spouses: John Caspar Henderson Smith (m. 1940-1942); Thomas K. Turnage (m. 1945-2000)
Died: May 21, 2014 in Bellingham, Washington
Age: 95
Interment: Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia
"Think what you're doing, doctor! To bring him back again, doctor, would unleash worse than murder upon humanity!"
- Nina
played by Jane Adams, dissuading Doctor Franz Edelmann from revitalizing Frankenstein's monster in the 1945 film, House of Dracula
Sources Consulted and Further Reading
IMDb. “Jane Adams (1918-2014).” Accessed May 3, 2024. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0011037/.
Kenton, Erle C., director. House of Dracula. Universal Pictures, 1945. 1 hr., 7 min.
