Iris Adrian Hostetter was an only child, born to Adrian Earl Hostetter and Florence (née Van Every), who wed in 1909 in Los Angeles, California. She was raised by her single mother in Los Angeles. Iris 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) and appeared as an extra or chorus girl in early sound films like Paramount on Parade (1930).

During the 1930s she specialised in playing hard-boiled, glamorous gold-diggers and gangsters’ “molls,” and played supporting roles in numerous features. She played “Gee-Gee Graham” in Lady of Burlesque. In the Jerry Lewis comedy, The Errand Boy, she played a glamorous movie star “Anastasia Anastasia”, whose on-set birthday party is wrecked by Lewis’s shenanigans. She made voice appearances on several radio programs, including the Abbott and Costello Show.

She acted regularly, albeit 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!, The Love Bug, The Shaggy D.A., Freaky Friday, and No Deposit, No Return. Disney director Robert Stevenson considered Adrian his “good-luck charm”. On television, she was a member of the cast of the unsuccessful situation comedy The Ted Knight Show in the spring of 1978. She also played numerous guest roles in television series such as Get Smart, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, The Munsters, The Love Boat, The Lucy Show and The Jack Benny Show.

She was married three times, the first time to Charles Over from 1935 to 1936; that marriage ended in divorce. Her second marriage, to George Jay, also ended in divorce. Her third and final marriage was to Ray Murphy, and lasted more than 30 years until his death in 1983. None of the marriages produced children.  Adrian passed away in Los Angeles, from injuries she sustained during the 1994 Northridge earthquake eight months earlier.