Noel Neill played an intrepid Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane in the 1950s TV series, 'Adventures of Superman.' She then left the show business.
She has walked further away now, at the age of 95. She died on Sunday in Tucson, Ariz., following a long and debilitating illness, said her manager and biographer, Larry Thomas Ward, to The Hollywood Reporter.
Ward wrote on Facebook: "Noel truly was Lois Lane, and for many of us, she was the first working woman seen on television. Few of her fans actually knew her real name, almost always simply calling her "Lois" to which she would unfailing answer with a bright smile and a kind word. It was more than a role to her."
The DC Comics Twitter account announced that she was "brave, smart, and witty. She embodied the very best qualities of Lois Lane."
Born on Nov. 20, 1920, to an editor for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, she did not take up her father's ambition that she should write for Women's Wear Daily. Instead, she became a performer, playing banjo in a musical trio and singing at a restaurant. She was just 5-foot-2, with dark, red hair and blue-gray eyes.
It was Bing Crosby who found her and got her a contract with Paramount Pictures. She appeared in a number of small roles for movies such as Henry Aldrich's Little Secret (1944), with Crosby in Here Come the Waves (1944) and in The Blue Dahlia (1946).
She was finally picked by Sam Katzman, who felt that she was perfect for Lois Lane.
"I had never heard of Superman," Neill said in a 2003 interview. "Back then, comics were read mostly by boys."
Superman did rescue her father's wish that she become a reporter.
Many women told her that Lois had inspired them to get in journalism, when they saw her working with newspapermen. However, Lois was always mild and rather timid. It seemed to reflect the "prefeminist 1950s."
"It was a man's world, and you didn't want to be too cranky," she told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in a 2002 interview. "When I played her, I could relate to her more if she wasn't bossy."
The first season of the syndicated Adventures of Superman featured Noel Neill from 1953, following which she was the captured damsel multiple times and rescued by George Reeves in his Superman role for 78 episodes. She liked her 1956 The Wedding of Superman most, in which she got a proposal---though it was just a dream
"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."
She got $225 an episode but left movies after the Superman series finished in 1958. "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."
She briefly became the mother of Lois (Margot Kidder) in Superman (1978). Even in 2006, she returned to the movie series in the opening scene of Bryan Singer's Superman Returns (2006), starring Brandon Routh.
Through the decades, she lectured at various colleges and dropped in at comic-book conventions and fan gatherings. In 2003, her biography by Ward was written through Truth, Justice and the American Way: The Life and Times of Noel Neill, the Original Lois Lane.
"She did whatever she wanted to do," Ward said. "That was the beauty of her skill. Ultimately, only she truly knew what was best for her, and that came out time and again. She was very smart, quite astute about the acting business."
She even had a statue at the city of Metropolis, Indiana, on her likeness in 2011.
