Adams was born Nicholas Aloysius Adamshock in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania to Peter Adamshock and Catherine Kutz. His father was a Ukrainian-born anthracite coal miner. In 1958 he told columnist Hedda Hopper, "We lived in those little company houses -- they were terrible. We had to buy from the company store and were always in debt and could never leave."

The family did leave when he was five years old, after Adams' uncle was killed in a mining accident. "My father piled all our belongings into an old jalopy, with our bedding on top", Adams recalled. "We didn't know where we were going. He started driving, and ran out of gas and money in Jersey City, New Jersey at Audubon Park. A man came over and started talking to us, a Mr. Cohn. He said to my father 'You look like you need a job,' and my father said 'I do'." Adams' father was given a job as janitor of an apartment building along with living quarters in the basement. Eventually, they moved to Van Nostrand Avenue between Ocean Avenue and Rutgers Avenue. His mother worked for Western Electric in Kearny, New Jersey.

While still in high school Adams was offered a playing position in minor league baseball with the St. Louis Cardinals but turned it down because he was uninterested in the low pay. He briefly worked as a bat boy for the Jersey City Giants, a local minor league team. Some sources recount Adams made money as a teenager by hustling pool games.

Early acting in New York

In 1948, while visiting New York, 17-year-old Nick Adamshock wandered into an audition for a play called The Silver Tassie and met Jack Palance (who was understudying for Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire). When Palance, whose father was also a coal miner, asked why he wanted to act Adams replied, "For the money." Palance introduced him to the director of The Silver Tassie as Nick Adams. After the director declined to hire him as an extra Palance sent Adams to a nearby junior theater group where he got his first acting job playing the role of Muff Potter in Tom Sawyer. While trying to get a role in the play Mister Roberts Adams had a brief encounter with Henry Fonda who advised him to get some training as an actor.

Adams' friends teased him about his acting ambitions. "Everybody thought I was crazy", he recalled. "My father said, 'Nick, get a trade, be a barber or something.' I said, 'But Pop, I want to do something where I can make lots of money. You can't make lots of money with just a trade.'"

After a year of unpaid acting in New York, Adams hitchiked to Los Angeles.

Struggling actor

Adams was an avid reader of fan magazines and came to believe he could meet agents and directors by being seen at the Warners Theater in Beverly Hills. He got a job there as doorman, usher and maintenance man, which included changing the notices on the theater marquee. He was fired after he put his own name up as a publicity stunt.

Adams' earliest reported paid acting job in Los Angeles was a stage role at the Las Palmas Theater in a comedy called Mr. Big Shot. Although he was paid about $60 a week Adams had to pay $175 for membership in Actors Equity. He also earned $25 one night at the Mocambo nightclub, filling in for Pearl Bailey who had fallen ill. Eight years later Hedda Hopper told Adams she recalled writing about him at the time and he replied by reciting back to her, "Nick Adams, gas station attendant from New Jersey, did an impersonation of Jimmy Cagney and a scene from Glass Menagerie."

After three years of struggle and optimistic self-promotion, his first film role came in 1951, an uncredited one-liner as a Western Union delivery boy in George Seaton's Somebody Loves Me (1952). This allowed him to join the Screen Actors Guild, but he was unable to find steady acting work, even when "creatively" claiming he had appeared with Palance in The Silver Tassie in New York. Undaunted, Adams joined a theater workshop run by Arthur Kennedy. In January 1952 Adams was drafted into the United States Coast Guard.

Supporting actor

Two and a half years later, in June 1954 his ship docked in Long Beach harbor and after a brash audition for director John Ford during which Adams did impressions of James Cagney and other celebrities while dressed in his Coast Guard uniform, he took his accumulated leave and appeared as Seaman Reber in the 1955 film version of Mister Roberts. Adams then completed his military service, returned to Los Angeles and at the age of 23, based on his work in the hit film Mr Roberts, was able to secure a powerful agent and signed with Warner Brothers.

Adams had a small role (as Chick) in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Also that year Adams played the role of "Bomber" the paper boy in the widely popular film adaptation of Picnic (1955) which was mostly filmed on location in Kansas and starred William Holden, Kim Novak and Susan Strasberg. He was not perceived by casting directors as tall or handsome enough for leading roles but during the late 1950s Adams had supporting roles in several successful television productions including one episode of Dead or Alive (1958) starring Steve McQueen and films such as Our Miss Brooks (1956), No Time for Sergeants (1958), Steve Canyon (1958) and Pillow Talk (1959).

James Dean

Adams may have first met James Dean in December 1950 while jitterbugging for a soft drink commercial filmed at Griffith Park. Adams spent three years in the US Coast Guard between the time this commercial was shot in late 1950 and the start of filming for Rebel Without a Cause in March 1955. Actor Jack Grinnage, who played Moose, recalled, "Off the set, Nick, Dennis, and the others would go out together--almost like the gang we portrayed--but Jimmy and Corey Allen... were not a part of that." They became friends during filming. During breaks, Dean and Adams entertained cast and crew with impersonations of Marlon Brando and Elia Kazan (who had directed Dean in East of Eden). A 1955 Warner Brothers press release quoted Dean as saying, "I shall be busy for the rest of 1955, and Nick will be doing film work for the next six months. Come 1956, however, I wouldn't be surprised to find myself with Adams doing a two-a-night nightclub routine--or acting in a comedy by William Shakespeare." When production was wrapped, Dean said in another press release, "I now regard Natalie, Nick and Sal as co-workers; I regard them as friends... about the only friends I have in this town. And I hope we all work together again soon." Following Dean's 1955 death in an automobile accident, Adams overdubbed some of James Dean's lines for the film Giant (these are in Jett Rink's speech at the hotel) and dated co-star Natalie Wood. Adams tried to capitalize on Dean's fame through various publicity stunts, including a claim he was being stalked by a crazed female Dean fan, allowing himself to be photographed at Dean's grave in a contemplative pose, holding flowers and surrounded by mourning, teenaged female fans along with writing articles and doing interviews about Dean for fan magazines. He also claimed to have developed Dean's affection for fast cars, later telling a reporter, "I became a highway delinquent. I was arrested nine times in one year. They put me on probation, but I kept on racing... nowhere."

Elvis Presley

Nick Adams' widely publicized friendship with Elvis Presley began in 1956 on the set of Presley's film Love Me Tender during the second day of shooting. Presley had admired James Dean and when the singer arrived in Hollywood he was encouraged by studio executives to be seen with some of the "hip" new young actors there. Meanwhile his manager Colonel Tom Parker was worried Elvis' new Hollywood acquaintances might influence Presley and even tell him what they were paying their managers and agents (usually a fraction of what Parker was getting). Elaine Dundy called Parker a "master manipulator" who used Nick Adams and others in the entourage (including Parker's own brother-in-law Bitsy Mott) to counter possible subversion against him and control Elvis' movements. She later wrote a scathing characterization of Adams:

...brash struggling young actor whose main scheme to further his career was to hitch his wagon to a star, the first being James Dean, about whose friendship he was noisily boastful... this made it easy for Parker to suggest that Nick be invited to join Elvis' growing entourage of paid companions, and for Nick to accept... following Adams' hiring, there appeared a newspaper item stating that Nick and Parker were writing a book on Elvis together.

Dundy also wrote, "Of all Elvis' new friends, Nick Adams, by background and temperament the most insecure, was also his closest." Adams was Dennis Hopper's roommate during this period and the three reportedly socialized together, with Presley "...hanging out more and more with Nick and his friends" and glad his manager "liked Nick." Decades later, Kathleen Tracy recalled Adams often met Presley backstage or at Graceland, where Elvis often asked Adams "to stay over on nights": "He and Elvis would go motorcycle riding late at night and stay up until all hours talking about the pain of celebrity" and enjoying prescription drugs.

Almost forty years later, writer Peter Guaralnick wrote that Presley found it "good running around with Nick ... — there was always something happening, and the hotel suite was like a private clubhouse where you needed to know the secret password to get in and he got to change the password every day." Presley's girlfriend June Juanico complained the singer was always talking about his friend Adams and James Dean. As with Dean, Adams capitalized on his association with Presley, publishing an account of their friendship in May 1957. In August 1958 after Elvis' mother Gladys died, Parker wrote in a letter, "Nicky came out to be with Elvis last Week was so very kind of him to be there with his friend."

The Rebel

In 1959 Adams starred in the ABC television series The Rebel playing the character Johnny Yuma, a wandering, ex-Confederate, journal-keeping, sawed-off shotgun toting "trouble-shooter" in the old American west. He is credited as a co-creator of The Rebel but had no role in writing the pilot or any of the series' episodes. Adams had asked his friend Andrew J. Fenady to write the pilot as a starring vehicle for him. The series' only recurring character, publicized as a "Reconstruction beatnik", was played by Adams. He reportedly consulted with John Wayne for tips on how to play the role. Adams wanted Presley to sing the theme song for The Rebel but the show's producer wanted Johnny Cash, who made it a hit. Guest stars appearing on the series during its two year run included Dan Blocker, Johnny Cash, Leonard Nimoy, Tex Ritter and Robert Vaughn. 76 half-hour episodes were filmed before the series was cancelled in 1961. Reruns were syndicated for several years. Adams went back to TV and film work, along with a role in the short-lived but critically successful television series Saints and Sinners.

Twilight of Honor

Adams was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as an unlikeable murder suspect in the film Twilight of Honor (1963) which featured the film debuts of both Linda Evans and Joey Heatherton. He campaigned heavily for the award, spending over $8,000 on ads in trade magazines but many of his strongest scenes had been cut from the movie and he lost to Melvyn Douglas.

Toho Studios

In 1964, Adams had a leading role in an episode (Fun and Games) of The Outer Limits television series. A review of this episode written over three decades later would characterize him as an "underrated actor." By this time Adams' career was stalling. He had high hopes his co-starring performance with Robert Conrad in Young Dillinger (1964) would be critically acclaimed but the project had low production values and both critics and audiences rejected the film. Also that year Adams guest starred in an episode of the short-lived CBS drama The Reporter.

In 1965, after publicly insisting he would never work in films produced outside the US, Adams began accepting parts in Japanese science fiction monster movies (kaiju). He landed major roles in two science fiction epics from Toho Studios in Chiyoda, Tokyo. His first Japanese movie was Frankenstein Conquers the World, in which he played Dr. James Bowen, a radiologist working in Hiroshima who encounters a new incarnation of the Frankenstein monster. Adams next starred in the sixth Godzilla film, Invasion of Astro-Monster (known in the U.S. as Monster Zero), in which he played Astronaut Glenn, journeying to the newly discovered Planet X. In both film plots his character had a love interest with characters portrayed by actress Kumi Mizuno. Actors at Toho Studios later fondly remembered Adams as a "team player". On the set of Monster Zero Adams and co-star Yoshio Tsuchiya (who played the villainous Controller of Planet X) reportedly got along well and played jokes on each other. Adams made four films in Japan during 1965 and 1966. During this time he also co-starred with Boris Karloff in Die, Monster, Die! (1965), a gothic horror—sci fi movie filmed in England.

1967: TV episodes and low budget films

In early 1967 Disney released Mosby's Marauders, a now mostly forgotten but successful Civil War drama told from a southern perspective with Adams in the role of a cruel Union army sergeant. Adams guest-starred in five episodes of four TV series that year, including an installment of his friend Robert Conrad's The Wild Wild West, an appearance in Combat! and two episodes of Hondo (a short-lived western which also had an ex-Confederate theme). Throughout 1967 and early 1968 he also worked in three low budget films. One of these was Mission Mars (1968) which, having been released the same year as Stanley Kubrick's widely praised A Space Odyssey, has been described as "rarely seen, and utterly dreadful." Adams' costume for this movie included an off-the-shelf motorcycle helmet. Reacting to Mission Mars over 30 years later, SciFi reviewer Gary Westfahl wrote, "The only quality that Adams could persuasively project on film was a desperate desire to be popular, to be liked.... which helps to explain why Adams got his foot in many doors..." Adams' last US production was a more solid B picture, a stock car movie filmed in Iowa called Fever Heat. His last film appearance was in the little seen Spanish-language western Los Asesinos filmed in Mexico City, Mexico.

Adams married former child actor Carol Nugent in 1959. Nugent had appeared in an episode of The Rebel. They had two children, Allyson Lee Adams (1960) and Jeb Stuart Adams (1961) who both later pursued careers in the film industry.

Sometimes acrimonious marital problems reportedly interfered with his ability to get lucrative acting parts after 1963. While promoting Young Dillinger during a television appearance on The Les Crane Show in early 1965, Adams "shocked" the viewing audience with an announcement he was leaving his wife...seemingly without telling her first. The couple publicly announced a reconciliation a week later but his career and personal life following this episode have been characterized as a "tragic freefall".

Adams and actress Kumi Mizuno may have had a short affair while he was working in Japan. "That's one of the reasons my parents were divorced", his daughter, playwright Allyson Lee Adams later said. "My dad had a penchant for becoming infatuated with his leading ladies. It was a way for him to take on the role he was playing at the time."

By July 1965 they were legally separated and Carol filed for divorce in September. The following month, while Adams was in Japan, Carol was granted a divorce and custody of the children. In January 1966 Nick and Carol announced another reconciliation on a local television show, Bill John's Hollywood Star Notebook. However in November 1966 Carol resumed the divorce proceedings and obtained a restraining order against him, alleging Adams was "prone to fits of temper" and in an affidavit charged he had "choked her, struck her and threatened to kill her during the past few weeks." On January 20, 1967 Adams was waiting for a court hearing to start when he was served with an $110,000 defamation suit by Carol's boyfriend. Nevertheless, nine days later he was granted temporary custody of the children. His son Jeb Adams later recalled, "He saw it as a competition, basically, more than anything of getting custody of us. But, a matter of a week or two later, he gave us back to my mom" and Carol later regained legal custody of the children.

After finishing Los Asesinos (1968) in Mexico Adams bought a plane ticket with his own money and flew to Rome to co-star with Aldo Ray in a SciFi horror movie called Murder in the Third Dimension, but when he got there found the project had been dropped. Susan Strasberg, who had worked with him 13 years earlier on the hit film Picnic and was living in Italy, encountered a thoroughly demoralized Adams in a Rome bar. On the night of February 7, 1968 his lawyer and friend, ex-LAPD officer Erwin Roeder, drove to the actor's house at 2126 El Roble Lane in Beverly Hills to check on him after a missed dinner appointment. Seeing a light on and his car in the garage, Roeder broke through a window and discovered Adams in his upstairs bedroom, slumped dead against a wall.

During the autopsy Dr. Thomas Noguchi found enough paraldehyde, sedatives and other drugs in the body "to cause instant unconsciousness." The death certificate lists "paraldehyde and promazine intoxication" as the immediate cause of death along with the notation accident; suicide; undetermined. During the 1960s drug interaction warnings were not so prominent as they later would be and the American Medical Association has subsequently warned these two types of drugs should never be taken together.

The death of Nick Adams has been cited in articles and books about Hollywood's unsolved mysteries along with speculation by a few of Adams' acquaintances he was murdered (but apparently with no motive ever offered) and claims no trace of paraldehyde (a liquid sedative often given to alcoholics at the time and one of two drugs attributed to his death) was ever found in his home. However, Adams' brother Andrew had become a medical doctor and prescribed the sedative to him. Moreover, a story in The Los Angeles Times reported stoppered bottles with prescription labels were found in the medicine cabinet near the upstairs bedroom where Adams' body was discovered. Through the years Adams' children offered speculation ranging from murder to accidental death, the latter perhaps caused by Raeder while trying to calm the actor's nerves with an unintentionally lethal combination of alcohol and prescription drugs (although the autopsy found no alcohol in Adams' blood). Adams' best friend, actor Robert Conrad, has consistently maintained the death was accidental.

Carol Adams is listed as Adams' spouse on his death certificate, evidence the divorce had not become final when the actor died. She and the children were living only a few blocks from Adams' recently-rented house on Roble Lane.

Nick Adams' remains were buried in Berwick, Pennsylvania. He appeared in over 150 television series episodes and feature films throughout a 20 year career. Half of these were episodes of The Rebel. The back of his gravestone bears a silhouette of Adams in the civil-war era cap from his TV series and reads Nick Adams - the rebel - actor of hollywood screens.

Adams's sexuality

Decades later, Adams' highly publicized life and death at a young age and his friendships with cultural icons such as James Dean and Elvis Presley along with his reported drug consumption made his private life the subject of many reports and assertions by some writers who have claimed Adams may have been gay or bisexual and may have had intimate relationships with both Dean and Presley. One of the earliest published mentions on this overall topic was made by gossip columnist Rona Barrett in her 1974 autobiography, in which she made no assertion Adams was homosexual or bisexual but claimed Adams had told her, along with a "whole roomful of people -- that he wasn't making it because no one in Hollywood's upper stratosphere would accept his wife." Barret wrote, "This was untrue. She was one of the most refreshing wives in the entire community", and went on to say Adams "had become the companion to a group of salacious homosexuals" who flattered the actor, which affected his judgement and caused him to blame Carol. Hollywood biographer Lawrence J. Quirk claimed Mike Connolly (a gay gossip columnist for the Hollywood Reporter from 1951 to 1966) "would put the make on the most prominent young actors, including Robert Francis, Guy Madison, Anthony Perkins, Nick Adams, and James Dean." According to American Film (1986), "Nick Adams, who was ... gay, was the butt of anti-gay humor in Pillow Talk.

Some writers later called Adams a "Hollywood hustler" or a "street hustler" but one journalist also refers to Adams as a pool hustler who made money in pool halls when he was a teenager in New Jersey and later while struggling to make ends meet during his early years in Hollywood .

Friendship with Dean and Presley

It is uncertain whether James Dean and Adams met before his service in the US Coast Guard (1952—1955) and subsequent role in Rebel Without a Cause (1955). In his 1986 gossip book about gay Hollywood, Conversations With My Elders, Boze Hadleigh claimed actor Sal Mineo told him in 1972, "I didn't hear it from Jimmy (James Dean), who was sort of awesome to me when we did Rebel. But Nick told me they had a big affair." Journalist, screenwriter and author of books about Hollywood, John Gregory Dunne wrote that "James Dean was bisexual, as were Nick Adams and Sal Mineo." In his book Elvis (1981) Albert Goldman wrote, "Nick Adams ingratiated himself with James Dean precisely as he would do a year or so later with Elvis. He offered himself to the shy, emotionally contorted and rebellious Dean, as a friend, a guide, a boon companion, a homosexual lover -- whatever role or service Dean required." According to Eric Braun, "Elvis was attracted by Adams' outgoing personality and the young actors caused quite a stir, cruising round Los Angeles with Natalie Wood, Russ Tamblyn and others on their Hondas." In 2005 Byron Raphael and Presley biographer Alanna Nash claimed Adams may have "swung both ways" like "Adams' good pal (and Elvis' idol) James Dean. Tongues wagged that Elvis and Adams were getting it on." According to a recent scandal book by Hollywood celebrity biographer Darwin Porter and former New York Times reporter Danforth Prince, Adams urged Dean to join him hustling gay men along San Monica Boulevard. Partly because of his large endowment, Nick became one of the most successful hustlers among the gay set. The authors also write that Presley wanted to hang out with Adams. Within a week, actor Sal Mineo said, "Nick told me, he and Elvis were having oral sex and mutual masturbation." When Presley and Adams shared hotel suites, the singer insisted that Nick walk around in a pair of tight-fitting white jockey shorts, arranged so his pubic hairs would peep out, and he confessed to Nick that this was his ultimate turn-on. Whenever Adams flew to Graceland, he brought a stash of gay pornography in order to use it as a stimulus for masturbation. Earl Greenwood, author and biographer David Bret and Adams' former fan mail secretary Bill Dakota made similar statements. For Adams's friendships with both Dean and Presley, see also Eric Braun, Frightening the Horses: Gay Icons of the Cinema (2002). However, in 2006 Kathleen Tracy noted, "It has since been speculated in Hollywood gossip that Presley and Adams may have shared some sort of intimate encounter. But there's no definitive evidence one way or another."

Studio-arranged dates

Adams regularly dated actresses with whom he made movies. During the mid-1950s photographs of him with actress Natalie Wood were widely publicized in fan magazines. Modern Screen wrote at the time "their relationship has been mostly for fun" and they shared "a tendency toward moodiness and unpredictability." The magazine also reported they had given joint interviews "in which they admitted they adored each other" and "they even came terribly close to getting married" in Las Vegas. The same article also remarked that on one of their trips they "posed for innumerable publicity photographs - that was the real reason for the trip - " and "Right now, both Nick and Natalie are inclined to deny the whole Las Vegas episode." In his 2004 biography Natalie Wood: A Life biographer and screenwriter Gavin Lambert wrote in passing, Wood's "first studio-arranged date with a gay or bisexual actor had been with Nick Adams." In his biography of gay Hollywood agent Henry Willson, Robert Hofler deals with the rise of the studio star system, in which several actors spent time on the homosexual casting couch and dated girls or even entered into sham marriages in order to cover their homosexuality. "In the Henry Willson date pool", the author says, "Nick Adams was one client, among many, who glommed on to Natalie Wood to get his picture taken." Suzanne Finstad cites actor Jack Grinnage, one of the gang members in Rebel Without a Cause, about Nick Adams's and Dennis Hopper's reasons "for getting close to Natalie. 'I remember being in Dennis' dressing room with Nick and Natalie ... I don't know which one of them said this - it was Nick or Dennis - but he said, "We're gonna hang on to her bra straps." Meaning up the career ladder.' Natalie's tutor, who knew Hopper and Adams off set, said, 'Both of those two guys were all over her ... because they could see that this movie was going to be a big thing for Natalie ... they were game for anything in order to be noticed and to get ahead in the business.' "

Actress Olive Sturgess relates: "When Nick and I went out, it was a casual thing — no great love or anything like that. ... I thought he was very troubled ... You could feel he was troubled. It was the manner he had — that was the way he was in real life, always brooding. ... When we went out, it was never on his motorcycle! That's one trick he couldn't pull on me. We always went in a car!"

Lack of confirmation

Because of morality clauses in studio contracts along with practical marketing concerns, most gay and lesbian actors during the 1950s and 1960s were discreet about their sexuality. However, Adams was known in Hollywood for embellishing and inventing stories about his show business experiences and long tried to capitalize on his associations with James Dean and Elvis Presley. In a brief biographical article journalist Bill Kelly wrote Adams "became James Dean's closest pal, although Nick was straight and Dean was bisexual." Moreover there are neither any court documents (such as from the long and drawn out divorce and child custody proceedings between him and his wife), personal letters from Adams nor directly attributable statements by any alleged male lovers to support the assertions.