LOS ANGELES (AP) – Jan Sterling, the cool, often conniving blonde in Hollywood film noir movies of the 1940s and ’50s, died Friday. She was 82.

Sterling broke her hip recently and had suffered a couple of strokes from which she never recovered, close friend Kay Tomborg said. She died at the Motion Picture and Television Fund’s home and hospital facility in suburban Woodland Hills.

Sterling’s most remembered role came in 1951 with Billy Wilder’s cynical film “Ace in the Hole,” which was rereleased as “The Big Carnival” when audiences were repelled by its harsh message. Kirk Douglas starred as a ruthless reporter seeking a scoop by prolonging the rescue of a man trapped in a cave. Sterling played a sardonic observer.

“I remember Jan Sterling as being a very funny woman,” actor Robert Arthur recalled Friday. “For me she was the comic relief in an otherwise grim story. She uttered the famous line: ‘I never go to church because it bags my nylons,”‘ said Arthur, who was also in the movie.

In 1954 Sterling played one of the terrified passengers on a troubled flight from Hawaii to the mainland in “The High and the Mighty.” Her performance won her a Golden Globe statue and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.

Jane Sterling Adriance was born into a socially prominent New York City family on April 3, 1921. Her blonde beauty and dramatic intensity made her a movie star in such films as “Johnny Belinda,” “Caged,” “Flesh and Fury,” “Split Second,” “The Human Jungle,” “Women’s Prison,” “Female on the Beach” and “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.”

Sterling was the widow of actor Paul Douglas and longtime companion of actor Sam Wanamaker, who died in 1993.