Ann Blyth, who drew a 1946 Oscar nomination for her memorable performance as the spoiled, selfish daughter of Joan Crawford’s hard-working, devoted title character in the classic film Mildred Pierce, died Wednesday. She was 98.
KABC’s George Pennachio reported her death.
The dark beauty was also noted for her roles in prison drama Brute Force (1947), Mario Lanza vehicle The Great Caruso (1951) and 1957’s The Helen Morgan Story with Paul Newman.
In an interstitial recorded many decades later for Turner Classic Movies, Blyth recalled shooting Mildred Pierce with Crawford and declared that despite their characters’ fraught relationship on screen, she and Crawford got along very well, and it was hard for her to slap Crawford for one of the movie’s pivotal scenes.
Crawford won the best actress Oscar for Mildred Pierce, which was also nominated for best picture, among other categories.
Mildred Pierce, based on the James M. Cain novel, was remade by Todd Haynes as an HBO miniseries in 2011 that starred Kate Winslet, with Evan Rachel Wood playing the ungrateful daughter Veda.
While briefly on vacation from filming Danger Signal, in 1945, Blyth broke her back in a sledding accident, and she spent a year and a half convalescing in a back brace, after which Universal used her in the excellent prison drama Brute Force, starring Burt Lancaster, while she was still confined to a wheelchair. After she recovered, Universal gave Blyth her first starring role in Swell Guy. She also starred opposite Mickey Rooney in the film noir Killer McCoy.
The actress had an interesting and challenging role in 1948’s Another Part of the Forest, a prequel to Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes in which she played a younger version of the Regina Hubard character immortalized on film by Bette Davis.
In 1950 melodrama Our Very Own, she played an adopted child searching for her birth mother, and Blyth played a woman wrongly convicted of murder in Thunder on the Hill. She was wife to Mario Lanza’s Enrico Caruso in 1951’s The Great Caruso, and she also appeared in lighter fare such as Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid and Katie Did It. In 1952 she starred opposite Gregory Peck in The World in His Arms, her last film for Universal.
At MGM she appeared in a series of operettas, including Kismet, but the era of the grand film musicals was ending, and she was not the only star whose career suffered as a result.
Going out on a high note, she played the tragic title character in 1957’s The Helen Morgan Story, about an alcoholic torch singer; strangely, her singing voice was dubbed.
Ann Marie Blyth was born in Mount Kisco, New York. She was young when her parents split, and her mother moved Blyth and her sister to New York City.
For a time aiming for an opera career, Blyth trained with the San Carlo Opera Company.
She made her single Broadway appearance in the original production of Lillian Hellman’s WWII drama Watch on the Rhine in 1941-42. She toured with the show in Los Angeles, where she was noticed and given a screen test at Universal.
The young actress made her big screen debut in 1944’s swing-era teen musical Chip Off the Block, a B musical starring Donald O’Connor in which she got to show off her pipes. Roles in similar fare followed: The Merry Monahans and Babes on Swing Street, also 1944 films. But she didn’t really get noticed until her role in Warner Bros.’ Mildred Pierce in 1945.
The devout Catholic focused on family after her film career essentially ended in 1957 as well as musical theater, appearing in The Sound of Music, The King and I, Carnival, Bittersweet, South Pacific, Show Boat and A Little Night Music.
Blyth had started making occasional appearances on television in the 1950s, appearing, for example, in a Lux Video Theatre adaptation of A Place in the Sun in 1954, on The DuPont Show With June Allyson in 1959 and The Dick Powell Theatre in 1962. She made several appearances on the TV Western Wagon Train in the early 1960s and starred in the Queen of the Nile episode of Twilight Zone in 1964. Later she appeared a couple of times on Quincy, M.E. before her final television appearance on Murder, She Wrote in 1985.
The actress was married to Dr. James McNulty from 1953 until his death in 2007. They had five children, 10 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.