Here’s Why Phyllis Coates Walked Away From TV’s ‘The Adventures of Superman’
When I was a kid, aside from the great Batman television show starring Adam West, The Adventures of Superman was the only other live-action superhero show that I remember watching on TV until the mid-seventies. While I’ve always loved all six seasons of the show, I must admit that the first season of Superman is just a little extra special for me. It seemed like it was a little bit grittier, less of a kids’ show and more of the kind of program that everyone in the family could enjoy.
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I have to say, much of what made that first season special has to do with Phyllis Coates, who played Lois Lane. You see, not only was Phyllis extraordinarily beautiful — she also just seemed to be more like how I imagined an assertive hard-nosed reporter would be. And while she would still find herself in frequent peril, I always felt that if Superman hadn’t broken through that wall and saved her, she still might’ve found a way to emerge victorious and beat the bad guys.
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Phyllis Coates was one of the most badass Lois Lanes that ever graced the TV or movie screen, and yet she’s also one of the most forgotten. This is despite the fact that prior to The Adventures of Superman, Phyllis was already a well-established figure in the entertainment industry. She’d been working for almost a decade, and the role of Lois Lane, while obviously a good one, wasn’t a part that she was pinning the entire success of her career on.
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So, maybe that’s part of the reason why, when The Adventures of Superman returned for a second season, Lois Lane was played by Noel Neill. Noel had played Lois before in the Superman movie serials of the forties, so for many, the change in actors wasn’t all that disconcerting.
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Why did Phyllis Coates walk away from the show? For years, the prevailing story has been that because there was a longer-than-normal break between the first and second seasons of the show, Phyllis had found additional work. When it came time to start filming season two, she just wasn’t available.
It’s easy to see why that seemed believable — Phyllis was one of the hardest-working actors in the industry during the fifties and early sixties. However, it was more than just other TV and movie commitments that kept Phyllis from returning to the role of Lois Lane.
Much later on, in 1990, Phyllis confessed to journalist Susan Cantrell her real reason for leaving: that she didn’t enjoy “playing dumb.” She said that during the first season, she argued repeatedly with producer Robert Maxwell that a woman as intelligent as Lois would figure out that Clark Kent was actually Superman. It just didn’t sit right with her that the show’s producers had no plans to ever let Lois be in on Clark Kent’s big secret.
Phyllis went on to say, “A lot of my assertiveness was hostility because I felt so restricted.” I’ve got to say I completely agree with her, and I’m not surprised at all that all of the live-action Superman TV shows and movies since that time have allowed Lois to eventually figure out that the Man of Steel is also her coworker at the Daily Planet.
Phyllis once again returned to the world of Superman during the 1990s when she played Lois’s mother, Ellen Lane, in a guest appearance on the ABC television program Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
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Her appearance on the show was the idea of the actress who was playing Lois in that show, Teri Hatcher, who told journalist Rip Rense in 1994, “I knew I was getting married in the script, and I didn’t know if there was even a mother established, and that’s when I thought: I wonder why my mother wouldn’t be coming to the wedding and, if she is, it should be Phyllis Coates!”.
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