She spent the early part of the decade performing with a satirical comedy troupe called “The Revuers” alongside future Broadway legends Betty Comden and Adolph Green. To make ends meet in New York, she worked as a switchboard operator at Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre. The Revuers moved to Los Angeles and signed with 20th Century Fox. Holliday appeared in minor, forgettable bit parts in mid-1940s films like Winged Victory and Greenwich Village before the studio dropped her.

Returning to New York, she made her formal Broadway debut in the 1945 play Kiss Them for Me, winning critical praise for playing a wistful prostitute. Her life changed forever when she was cast as Billie Dawn in Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday (1946). Playing the dim-witted but secretly sharp mistress of a corrupt tycoon, Holliday became an overnight sensation. The stage production ran for four years and skyrocketed her to theatrical stardom.

Columbia Pictures initially hesitated to cast her in the movie adaptation of Born Yesterday. To prove her on-screen viability, her friend Katharine Hepburn and director George Cukor custom-tailored a scene-stealing supporting role for her in the classic romantic comedy Adam’s Rib (1949).

Her brilliant, hilarious performance as a woman who shoots her cheating husband convinced Columbia executive Harry Cohn that she was a star. This secured her the leading role in the 1950 film version of Born Yesterday, which ultimately won her an Academy Award for Best Actress.

Though Marilyn Monroe often dominates the modern memory of the technicolor masterpiece Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), Russell was actually the top-billed star at the time, and she was paid significantly more ($200,000 compared to Monroe’s $18,000). Russell played Dorothy Shaw, the sharp-witted, grounded brunette foil to Monroe’s naive Lorelei Lee. Contrary to the tabloid rumors of a bitter rivalry, Russell and Monroe got along famously. Russell often protected the notoriously anxious Monroe on set, helping her out of her dressing room when stage fright struck.

Russell spent much of the 1950s under contract to eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes (via RKO Pictures), who was obsessed with her image. However, Russell herself had a brilliant, down-to-earth sense of humor that subverted the passive sex-symbol trope. She often played women who were witty, fiercely independent, and completely unfazed by alpha males. She held her own against the toughest leading men of the era, starring alongside Robert Mitchum in the gritty noirs His Kind of Woman (1951) and Macao (1952), and Clark Gable in the Western The Tall Men (1955).

Russell wasn’t just a film actress; she utilized her deep, sultry contralto voice extensively throughout the decade. Beyond Blondes, she starred in musical comedies like Double Dynamite (1951) with Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx, and The French Line (1953).

The 1950s cemented Russell as a pop-culture icon of industrial proportions. Howard Hughes famously used his structural engineering background to design a seamless, cantilevered underwire bra specifically to emphasize her bust during The Outlaw. Though Russell later admitted she secretly discarded the uncomfortable contraption and just used her own clever padding, the “Jane Russell bra” became a cultural fixture of 1950s Americana, eventually leading her to become a famous spokesperson for Playtex bras in later decades.