Paramount Pictures apparently liked what they saw, and she was signed to a feature player contract in 1934, a move which brought her back to her home town, Hollywood.Adrian's first full-length film was Rumba (1935) which reunited her with her touring tap dancer George Raft. Among her many following films were: Stolen Harmony (1935), Our Relations (1936) with Laurel and Hardy, Back Door to Heaven (1939), The Road to Zanzibar (1941), second of the sensationally successful Bob Hope / Bing Crosby musical comedies, Horror Island (1941), Too Many Blondes (1941), Roxie Hart (1942) with Ginger Rogers, Juke Box Jenny (1943), The Woman in the Window (1944), directed by Fritz Lang and starring Edward G. Robinson, The Stork Club (1945) with Betty Hutton, and many, many more. In all of them she was virtually the same, a cheap night-club floozie who gave any man as good as she got, if not better.As her youth faded, and her hair needed more and more of the bright blonde bleach, she began to use her money with wisdom.

Married to a popular football star, Fido Murphy, she invested in real estate, owning and managing a number of apartment houses in Los Angeles. As television grew, she appeared in various commercials, including some for toothpaste. Finally she made a comeback in films as a still brassy, loud- mouthed old lady in several Walt Disney productions, including The Love Bug (1969), The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) and Herbie Goes Bananas (1980). She was deeply interested in astrology, and this latterday combined career prompted her to comment, 'My sign is Gemini, the twins - the actress and the landlady]'Recently she remarked that the California earthquakes were causing her some concern. 'One good shake and the landlady is out of business,' she said. On 17 January the Northridge earthquake caused her to fall and break a hip. It was an injury from which she did not recover.(Photograph omitted).

Harry Hodgkinson, writer, journalist, businessman, Albanianist: born Kirkham, Lancashire 15 March 1913; married 1941 Tessa McKenzie (died 1942), 1947 Marie Elizabeth Howorth (died 1983; one daughter); died London 2 October 1994. HARRY HODGKINSON was a great Balkanist and friend of Albania, and a distinguished travel writer. In a long and varied life he was also an intelligence officer, Liberal Party ideologue and oil company executive. He was born of strong Liberal farming stock in Lancashire, and showed early academic promise, winning a scholarship at the age of nine to Kirkham Grammar School. After leaving school at the age of 16, he became a cub reporter on a local newspaper, then graduated to the Blackpool Times, which he later described as 'a decrepit newspaper founded by my great- uncle as a Liberal witness in Tory Blackpool'. After it went bankrupt in 1933, he joined the Bradford Telegraph until moving to London in 1937 for a full-time job at the Liberal Party headquarters.But Hodgkinson's horizons were wider than those of many of his contemporaries, and he became an obsessive traveller in all the Balkan countries. In 1936 he walked from Charing Cross to Damascus Gate in Jerusalem. He visited the Albania of King Zog in 1937, fell in love with the country immediately, and joined the Anglo-Albanian Association on his return to England.As a result, he met the great pioneering ethnologist Edith Durham, author of The Struggle for Scutari (1904) and High Albania (1909), then in the final years of her life, and began to form social and political contacts with Albanians, and the Albanian government itself, that were to prove invaluable to the British government in the post-war period.