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 tune “The Loveliest Night of the Year” 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 Power (1947) and was a pretty creature from the ocean introduced residence 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), through which 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 along with her profession in disarray. A whole lot of youngsters had auditioned, however Crawford noticed one thing in Blyth and helped her get the position by showing reverse her in her display take a look at.
“I knew that other people wanted the part as well but I was the lucky one because Joan Crawford did the test with me, and it made a world of difference,” she told THR’s Scott Feinberg in 2013. “People just didn’t do that, not people of her stature.”
Crawford’s instincts had been right; for taking part in the self-sacrificing mom, she received the very best actress Oscar (lacking the ceremony however famously accepting the trophy at residence in mattress in her pajamas), and Blyth was nominated for greatest supporting actress.
Blythe excelled as the gorgeous brat who will do something — even commit homicide — for cash.
“This Blyth child is exquisite in her understanding of one of the most difficult roles ever written,” The Hollywood Reporter wrote in its evaluate. “Only the undeniable genius that has made Joan Crawford the great popular star she long since became enables her to keep Ann Blyth from running off with the film.”
5 days after wrapping Mildred Pierce, Blyth broke her again in a sledding mishap close to Lake Arrowhead, California.
“One minute we were sailing down the hard-packed icy hillside like snowbirds, then there was a crash and I fell on my back with a sickening thud,” she wrote in a 1954 storyheadlined “My Career Took a Toboggan Ride.” “I didn’t cry out. The feeling was too big 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, sporting a studio-designed robe that match over her again brace.
Within the Nineteen Seventies, Blyth turned identified to a brand new era of TV viewers when she appeared as a mother in a sequence 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 lift 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 in school, she was approached by author Lillian Hellman and producer-director Herman Shumlin to learn for a component within the anti-Nazi Broadway drama Watch on the Rhine. She received 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 nearly 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 partially to supply competitors for his or her chronically dissatisfied resident soprano, Deanna Durbin, and she or he rapidly was solid in 4 musicals launched in 1944: Chip Off the Outdated Block, Babes on Swing Avenue, The Merry Monahans and Bowery to Broadway (three of these with O’Connor).
Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce, primarily based 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 couple 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 function — she give up the films though she was thought of for the lead in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), for which Joanne Woodward received the very best actress Oscar.
Nonetheless, she had a nightclub act in Las Vegas, appeared in native theater and appeared on such TV reveals as Wagon Practice, The Twilight Zone (as a Hollywood star who doesn’t age), The Identify of the Recreation, 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 kids, Timothy, Maureen, Kathleen, Terence and Eileen, and had been collectively till his 2007 demise at age 89.
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
