Jill Adams was an English actress, artist and fashion model. She featured or starred in over 25 films during the 1950s and 1960s.
Life
Jill Adams was born Jill Siggins in London in 1930, the daughter of the silent-screen actress Molly Adair. Jill's New Zealand-born father, Arthur James Siggins, had met the Irish-American Adair when she was on location filmingThe Blue Lagoon. Siggins, a former member of the British South Africa Police and an expert animal handler, worked on the film The Four Feathers, and later wrote a book about the experience, Shooting with Rifle and Camera. Jill was one of four children. When she was six years old, she moved to Wales where Jill continued her education, after which she worked for four years on a farm. Her ambition was to become an artist, and she moved to London to pursue that career, taking work as a sales assistant, secretary and window dresser. After working as a window dresser, by 1944 Adams was an assistant artist at Mr & Mrs Jones, a department store, where she was required to attend fashion shows and sketch the clothes. One day a model failed to arrive, and Adams, found to be the perfect size, stepped in, thus beginning her modelling career, which included a flag-hoisting recruitment poster for the Women's Royal Naval Service. During her modelling days she was 'discovered' and begin an acting career that spanned two decades. Her most notable films were comedies, at which she excelled, such as Doctor at Sea, Brothers in Law and The Green Man, in which she starred with Alastair Sim and George Cole. She also did some stage and radio work. In 1951 she married a young American navy yeoman, Jim Adams, whose surname she adopted professionally, which resulted in the birth of a daughter, Tina. The same year, Jill Adams had a part in a late-night stage revue, On with the New, starring Anthony Newley, and though her marriage ended in 1953, she began taking bit roles in movies – dancing with Nigel Patrick in Forbidden Cargo, appearing in the Arthur Askey comedy The Love Match, and in Doctor at Sea with Dirk Bogarde. She had one of her first substantial roles in the sprightly "Quota quickie" movie One Jump Ahead, in a rare villainous portrayal as a murderess who was once an old flame of a reporter who is usually "one jump ahead" of the police. Adams was one of Rex Harrison's seven wives in the sophisticated comedy The Constant Husband. At the peak of her acting career in 1957, Adams married the well-known BBCTV and radio personalityPeter Haigh, and had a second daughter, Peta Louise. Adams appeared with Attenborough again in The Scamp, and was given star billing in an Australian movie,Dust in the Sun, but it had limited distribution. In 1960/61 she featured in a television series, The Flying Doctor, based on the real-life activities of the Royal Flying Doctor Service serving the Australian outback. Her career at this point seemed to lose direction. Death Over My Shoulder and Crosstrap had been poor "B" movies, and her roles in Carry On Constable and Doctor in Distress were small. The Yellow Teddy Bears was an exploitation thriller, and her small role in Promise Her Anything, starring Warren Beatty and Leslie Caron, was to be her last.In 1971, the whole family moved to the Algarve, in southern Portugal, where they ran a small hotel for several years in the village of Albufeira. When her second marriage ended, she continued with a restaurant career, accompanied by her partner Mike. Some years later she retired from the business and with her new partner, Alan "Buster" Jones, an accountant, went to live just outside Lisbon. They later moved to Spain, where they enjoyed homes close to Alicante, then Barcelona and eventually in the Costa del Sol. After Buster died in 1996, she moved back to Portugal, to be with her granddaughter, Emma, and her great-granddaughter, Tania, and began painting again. She battled cancer from 2005 until her death.
