Ann Blyth, the petite actress and singer who earned an Oscar nomination for portraying Joan Crawford’s demon daughter, Veda, within the traditional 1945 melodrama Mildred Pierce, has died. She was 98.
Blyth died Wednesday of pure causes, KABC’s George Pennacchio reported.
An operatic soprano, Blyth launched the traditional music “The Loveliest Night time of the Yr” when she performed the spouse of Enrico Caruso (Mario Lanza) in The Nice Caruso (1951) and starred in three different MGM musicals: Rose Marie (1954), The Scholar Prince (1954) and Vincente Minnelli’s Kismet (1955).
Blyth additionally portrayed Burt Lancaster’s spouse within the gritty jail drama Brute Pressure (1947) and was a sexy creature from the ocean introduced dwelling by William Powell within the fantasy Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948).
After she departed MGM and hooked on with Warner Bros., she starred in two 1957 biopics: Sidney Sheldon’s The Buster Keaton Story, additionally starring her former teenage dancing companion, Donald O’Connor, and The Helen Morgan Story (1957), wherein she performed the alcoholic Thirties torch singer reverse Paul Newman.
On mortgage from Common, the place she performed harmless teenagers in small roles, Blyth, then 16, landed the a part of the spoiled Veda reverse Crawford, who had simply left MGM together with her profession in disarray. Tons of of youngsters had auditioned, however Crawford noticed one thing in Blyth and helped her get the position by showing reverse her in her display check.
“I knew that different individuals needed the half as effectively however I used to be the fortunate one as a result of Joan Crawford did the check with me, and it made a world of distinction,” she instructed THR’s Scott Feinberg in 2013. “Individuals simply didn’t try this, not individuals of her stature.”
Crawford’s instincts have been appropriate; for taking part in the self-sacrificing mom, she gained the most effective actress Oscar (lacking the ceremony however famously accepting the trophy at dwelling in mattress in her pajamas), and Blyth was nominated for finest supporting actress.
Blythe excelled as the gorgeous brat who will do something — even commit homicide — for cash.
“This Blyth little one is beautiful in her understanding of some of the tough roles ever written,” The Hollywood Reporter wrote in its evaluate. “Solely the plain genius that has made Joan Crawford the nice fashionable star she lengthy since grew to become permits her to maintain Ann Blyth from operating off with the movie.”
5 days after wrapping Mildred Pierce, Blyth broke her again in a sledding mishap close to Lake Arrowhead, California.
“One minute we have been crusing down the hard-packed icy hillside like snowbirds, then there was a crash and I fell on my again with a sickening thud,” she wrote in a 1954 storyheadlined “My Profession Took a Toboggan Trip.” “I didn’t cry out. The sensation was too large for that.”
The 5-foot-2 Blyth spent seven months in physique solid and a number of other extra confined to a wheelchair. She did handle to attend the 1946 Oscars, carrying a studio-designed robe that match over her again brace.
Within the Nineteen Seventies, Blyth grew to become recognized to a brand new technology of TV viewers when she appeared as a mother in a collection of commercials for Hostess Cupcakes, pitching Twinkies, Crumb Truffles and Ding Dongs.
Anne Marie Blythe (she shortened her first and final names after coming to Hollywood) was born Aug. 16, 1927, in Mount Kisco, New York, and raised on the Decrease East Facet on Manhattan. Her father left the household, leaving her mom to boost her and her older sister.
Blyth sang and recited poetry on radio reveals beginning at age 6 and carried out with the San Carlos Opera Firm. Within the principal’s workplace at college, she was approached by author Lillian Hellman and producer-director Herman Shumlin to learn for an element within the anti-Nazi Broadway drama Watch on the Rhine. She gained the position as Paul Lukas’ daughter in a 1941-42 manufacturing, turning 13 through the run.
After Watch on the Rhine closed on Broadway after virtually 400 performances, she toured across the nation with the play and joined different castmembers for dinner on the White Home with President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Ann Blyth
Photofest
In 1943, Blyth was signed by Common partly to supply competitors for his or her chronically dissatisfied resident soprano, Deanna Durbin, and she or he shortly was solid in 4 musicals launched in 1944: Chip Off the Outdated Block, Babes on Swing Road, The Merry Monahans and Bowery to Broadway (three of these with O’Connor).
Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce, based mostly on a 1941 novel by James M. Cain, got here subsequent, and after her again mended, she performed one other brat in Swell Man (1946). A number of years later, she refused to play one other dangerous woman within the movie Deserted and was placed on unpaid suspension.
Blyth additionally appeared in such movies as Killer McCoy (1947), One other A part of the Forest (1948), Prime O’ the Morning (1949), As soon as Extra, My Darling (1949), The Golden Horde (1951), I’ll By no means Neglect You (1951), One Minute to Zero (1952), The World in His Arms (1952), All of the Brothers Have been Valiant (1953), The King’s Thief (1955) and Slander (1957).
Curtiz’s The Helen Morgan Story was her final characteristic — she give up the films despite the fact that she was thought-about for the lead in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), for which Joanne Woodward gained the most effective actress Oscar.
Nevertheless, she had a nightclub act in Las Vegas, appeared in native theater and appeared on such TV reveals as Wagon Prepare, The Twilight Zone (as a Hollywood star who doesn’t age), The Identify of the Sport, Quincy M.E. and Homicide, She Wrote.
In 1953, Blyth wed Los Angeles obstetrician James McNulty, the brother of singer Dennis Day. They’d 5 youngsters, Timothy, Maureen, Kathleen, Terence and Eileen, and have been collectively till his 2007 dying at age 89.
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
