Vale: Noel Neill

US actress Noel Neill, best known as Lois Lane on The Adventures of Superman, has died, aged 95.

She died on Sunday at her home in Arizona after a long illness, her manager said.

Neill became the first actress to play the Daily Planet reporter on screen, first in a Columbia Pictures serial in 1948.

After actress Phyllis Coates became unavailable for the second season of the TV series, The Adventures of Superman, Neill reclaimed the role in 1953. She appeared alongside George Reeves in 78 episodes until 1958.

But she quit acting thereafter. “I just figured I’d worked enough, I didn’t have any great ambition,” she told The New York Times in a 2006 interview. “Basically, I’m a beach bum. I was married, we lived near the beach, that was enough for me.”

Neill also had film roles in Henry Aldrich’s Little Secret, Here Come the Waves, The Blue Dahlia, The Big Clock, The Sky Dragon, The Greatest Show on Earth, American in Paris, Invasion U.S.A. with Coates, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Junior Prom and Campus Sleuth.

In 1978 she returned to as the mother of Lois (Margot Kidder) in Superman (1978), starring Christopher Reeve. She also showed up on a 1991 episode of Superboy, and in the opening scene of Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006), starring Brandon Routh.

“She had this wonderful, perky touch to Lois Lane,” her late co-star Jack Larson (who played Jimmy Olson) said in 2003, “and she could basically do everything in one take, which is what they liked. If you blew a scene and had to do four takes, everyone was disgruntled.”

Source: Hollywood Reporter