Born in Los Angeles, California as Iris Adrian Hofstadter, Adrian won a beauty pageant and worked with the Ziegfeld Follies, before she entered films at the end of the silent era in Chasing Husbands (1928).

During the 1930s she specialised in playing glamorous gold-diggers and gangsters' "dames", and played supporting roles in numerous features. She was considered a versatile actress, who could play drama or comedy, and she was also regarded as a capable dancer, dancing in a couple of films with George Raft.

She continued to act regularly without achieving star status and by the end of the 1960s had appeared in more than one hundred films. In her later years she appeared in several Walt Disney films, including That Darn Cat! (1965), The Love Bug (1970), The Shaggy D.A. (1976) and Freaky Friday (1976). She also played numerous guest roles in such television series as Get Smart, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, The Munsters and The Love Boat.

She was married three times, the first time to Charles Over in 1935 (divorced in 1936), the second to George Jay (also divorced), and her final marriage was to Ray (Fido) Murphy which lasted over 30 years. She had no children.

Known for sense of humour, she wryly commented in an interview late in her life that the only thing she did not like about ageing was that she could no longer attract gangsters.

She died in Los Angeles, from injuries she sustained during the 1994 Northridge earthquake nine months earlier, and was interred in the Forest Lawn Cemetery.