Iris Adrian, Actress Who Played ‘Toughs’

Iris Adrian, the wisecracking, gum-snapping gun moll or comic who portrayed what she said were “tough broads who were never mean” in dozens of films, has died.

Richard Kappler, a longtime friend, said that the brassy blonde veteran of 150 generally low-budget pictures, whose last appearances were in such Disney films as “The Love Bug” and “Herbie Goes Bananas,” was 82.

Kappler said she had died in her Hollywood Hills home of complications of injuries she suffered during the Northridge earthquake in January.

Married for nearly 30 years to former football star Ray (Fido) Murphy, Miss Adrian enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle thanks to shrewd investments she had made in real estate over the years.

Interviewers delighted in the candor she maintained into her last decade. She once told author Richard Lamparski that “I never went with actors. Basically they’re bums who got lucky in the looks department. Vain, vain. It would be like dating another dame.”

She was raised in Los Angeles and forced to quit school after her father died during the post-World War I flu epidemic.

She entered beauty contests, won several and became a chorine in a local musical revue.

She toured with the Fred Waring shows of the early 1930s and was signed for the Ziegfeld Follies of 1931.

She returned to Los Angeles and began developing her trademark wisecracking character for skits at Nils T. Granlund’s nightclubs in Hollywood, she told Lamparski.

Miss Adrian began in films in the early 1930s and her best-known parts included the killer in “Roxie Hart” in 1942 and the burlesque queen in “Lady of Burlesque” the following year. Others were “The Stork Club,” “The Woman in the Window,” “The Paleface,” “My Favorite Spy,” “The Odd Couple,” “The Apple Dumpling Gang” and many more.

She also appeared regularly on Jack’s Benny’s TV shows and with him on his personal appearance tours.

A funeral service is scheduled today at 12:30 p.m. at the Old Church, Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, Hollywood Hills.