Adele Jergens

Adele Jergens (November 26, 1917 – November 22, 2002) was an American actress and performer born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended South Side High School in Rockville Centre, New York, and began her performance training with ballet before transitioning to burlesque dancing, a shift that earned her the nickname "the girl with the million-dollar legs" among teachers and classmates.

Jergens built her early career through chorus work at the Brooklyn Fox Theatre and the Ziegfeld Follies, and by 1938 had become a model with the John Robert Powers agency. Her profile rose considerably when she was named "Miss World's Fairest" at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Around the same period she worked briefly as a Rockette and was recognized as the number-one showgirl in New York City.

Her Broadway career spanned 1935 to 1942 and included appearances in Jubilee, Leave It to Me!, the musical Du Barry Was a Lady, the musical Banjo Eyes, and the burlesque revue Star and Garter. In the 1942 production of Star and Garter, she served as understudy to Gypsy Rose Lee.

In 1944, Jergens signed a film contract with Columbia Pictures, dyeing her brown hair blonde for her new screen career. Her early film roles frequently cast her as burlesque dancers or disreputable women, including parts in Down to Earth alongside Rita Hayworth (1947), The Dark Past with William Holden (1948), and Armored Car Robbery (1950). That same year she appeared in Try and Get Me, playing a criminal's girlfriend. In 1948 she portrayed Marilyn Monroe's mother in Ladies of the Chorus, despite being only nine years Monroe's senior. She also appeared in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man (1951) and The Cobweb (1955), the latter directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Richard Widmark and Lauren Bacall. In addition to her film work, Jergens appeared in the 1950s radio program Stand By for Crime, playing Glamourpuss Carol Curtis opposite her real-life husband Glenn Langan, who portrayed Chuck Morgan.

Jergens met Langan in 1949 on the set of Treasure of Monte Cristo and married him the same year. The couple had one son, Tracy Langan, who worked in Hollywood as a film technician and died of a brain tumor in 2001. Glenn Langan died of lymphoma on January 26, 1991, at age 73. Jergens died of pneumonia on November 22, 2002, at her home in Camarillo, California, at the age of 84. She was buried alongside her husband and son at Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California.