Phyllis Coates was the first actress to play Lois Lane on television when she starred in the 1952 first season of “Adventures of Superman.”
- Died: October 11, 2023 (Who else died on October 11?)
- Details of death: Died at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California of natural causes at the age of 96.
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Phyllis Coates’s legacy
Coates got her start in Hollywood appearing in the “Joe McDoakes” series of short films, starring as the main character’s wife, Alice McDoakes. In 1951, she landed a role as Lois Lane in “Superman and the Mole Men,” the first feature-length superhero film. Several Superman short films had preceded it, so Coates wasn’t the first to play Lois Lane onscreen. But when “Superman and the Mole Men” was spun off into the “Adventures of Superman” TV series, she became the first small screen Lois Lane. She received equal billing to George Reeves (1914–1959), the popular early Superman actor.
When Coates chose to leave “Adventures of Superman” after its first season, she was replaced by Noel Neill (1920–2016), who had been the first actress to play Lois Lane in the early shorts. Neill’s 2016 death left Coates the last surviving star of “Adventures of Superman.” Though Coates didn’t embrace her status as a superhero icon as fully as Neill later did, she returned to the world of Superman in 1994 to appear as Lois Lane’s mother in an episode of “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.”
Coates also starred in the 1950s sitcom “This Is Alice.” Her other TV appearances included “The Lone Ranger,” “Perry Mason,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “Gunsmoke,” and “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.” On the big screen, she had roles in “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein,” “Cattle Empire,” “Goodnight, Sweet Marilyn,” and other films.
Tributes to Phyllis Coates
Full obituary: The Hollywood Reporter
