Phyllis Coates, who portrayed “Superman” Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane, has died. She was 96.

Coates, who was the primary actor to play the enduring position on the Fifties “Adventures of Superman” tv sequence, died Wednesday of pure causes on the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s retirement neighborhood in Woodland Hills.

Her daughter Laura Press confirmed the demise, per the New York Times.

Coates was born Gypsie Ann Stell in Wichita Falls, Texas, on Jan. 15, 1927. Her father, William Robert “Rush” Stell, was a farmer and sheet steel employee. Her household later moved to Odessa, Texas, the place she attended faculty. When she was 16, she left Texas for California along with her mom, Lorraine “Luzzie” Jack Teel, to attend Los Angeles City College. It was in California the place Coates lower her tooth in present enterprise, performing in Ken Murray’s vaudeville present. “That did it; I decided then to become an actress,” she told Western Clippings.

With a profession spanning greater than half a century, Coates was maybe greatest identified for her portrayal of Lois Lane in each the 1951 movie “Superman and the Mole Men” and within the first season of the tv sequence “Adventures of Superman.” The actor was the primary to painting the career-driven reporter and love curiosity of Superman on the small display screen. Actor Noel Neill portrayed Lane first on the massive display screen in two 15-part film serials, “Superman” (1948) and “Atom Man vs. Superman” (1950), earlier than Coates took over for the 1951 full-length movie. The success of “Superman and the Mole Men” prompted the manufacturing of the syndicated tv present that starred George Reeves because the Man of Steel.

Coates portrayed Lane for just one season and 26 episodes earlier than shifting on from the sequence. She earned about $350 per episode.

In 1994, Coates told The Times from the Warner Bros. set of “Lois & Clark” that when she portrayed Lane she “had no wardrobe mistress and no hairdresser in those days. Oh boy — I had one suit! One suit, and a double in case I got egg on it! And George’s dresser dressed me. My makeup man was Harry Thomas, who made up every monster in Hollywood.”

In Tom Weaver’s 2006 guide, “Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes,” Coates recalled being “nearly blown up, beaten up, exploded, exploited — I guess it was because we were young and dumb, but we put up with a lot of stuff.

“Not too long ago I saw an episode [‘Night of Terror’] where I got knocked out!”

Coates had apparently overstepped her mark and was by chance punched within the face by actor Frank Richards, knocking her out cold.

Coates informed Western Clippings that she finally left the “Superman” sequence as a result of she’d at all times had the hots to play comedy. “My ‘Superman’ contract expired. I left the series to do a pilot with [fellow actors] Jack Carson and Allen Jenkins. We did the pilot for MCA; shortly thereafter Jack got sick, so it never followed through. That’s why I left, not ’cause I was mad or anything like that. I loved George, I loved the crew. They offered me a large increase in salary to stay, but I really wanted out.”

After “Superman,” Coates dyed her brunette locks platinum to drop her affiliation with Lane and went on to seem within the 1952 Republic serials “Jungle Drums of Africa” reverse Clayton Moore of “The Lone Ranger,” through which she portrayed the daughter of a late medical missionary in Africa who has shut encounters with ferocious beasts as she carries on her father’s work. She additionally starred within the title position of 1954’s “Panther Girl of the Kongo.”

“I had to ride an elephant all day,” she said in “Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes.” “And my legs were raw from the hair on the elephant — I never knew until then that an elephant even had hair!”

Coates additionally appeared on tv reveals “Leave It to Beaver,” “Tales of Wells Fargo,” “Rawhide,” “The Untouchables,” “Perry Mason,” “The Patty Duke Show” and “Gunsmoke.” She was identified for her B-list westerns such because the 1953 movie “Topeka,” 1954’s “Gunfighters of the Northwest,” and 1958 movies “Cattle Empire” and “Blood Arrow.”

Despite being a western-film favourite, Coates stated she was really a awful horseback rider. “I only got on a horse when I had to and got off as soon as I could,” she informed Western Clippings. Coates most popular stage appearing to display screen appearing, and though she appeared in dozens of westerns over time, she most cherished engaged on the tv sequence “The Untouchables.”

“I was not as fortunate as some actors. … I didn’t get rehearsal time,” she informed Western Clippings. “We made ‘quickies.’ We made an entire film in six days. There was no second take. If you took a second take, everybody pouted and got mad. They lit the cowboys and lit the cowboy’s hat and the cowboy’s horse. It was that kind of quickie stuff. So, when I got to work with a good director on an ‘Untouchables’ where he took time and went in for some fine points in acting … I loved it!”

Coates married tv director Richard L. Bare in 1948, however the two break up a 12 months later. In 1950, she married married jazz pianist Robert Nelms and gave start to a daughter, however she and Nelms divorced in 1953. She was married to “Leave It to Beaver” director Norman Tokar; they divorced in 1965. Then she wed Howard Press, a physician, who she stated “didn’t understand the movie business,” so she gave it up and helped him run his follow. They later divorced.

After her hiatus from appearing whereas married to Press, Coates resumed her profession as soon as she was single once more. She performed Marilyn Monroe’s mentally in poor health mom, Gladys Baker, within the 1989 movie “Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn,” and on a 1994 episode of ABC’s “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” Coates performed the mom of Teri Hatcher’s Lois Lane.

Coates stated in her 1994 interview with The Times, which adopted her return to “Superman” to play Lane’s mom, “My son said this is a gestalt. And it is, it’s kind of something going full circle.” Times contributor Rip Rense described Coates on the time as “a handsome blue-eyed still-petite sexagenarian whose alto voice is unchanged since 1951.”

Coates is survived by her daughters, Laura Press and Zoe Christopher, and granddaughter Olivia. Her son, David Tokar, died in 2011.