Ann Blyth, the petite actress and singer who earned an Oscar nomination for portraying Joan Crawford’s demon daughter, Veda, in the classic 1945 melodrama Mildred Pierce, has died. She was 98.
Blyth died Wednesday of natural causes, KABC’s George Pennacchio reported.
An operatic soprano, Blyth introduced the classic song “The Loveliest Night of the Year” when she played the wife of Enrico Caruso (Mario Lanza) in The Great Caruso (1951) and starred in three other MGM musicals: Rose Marie (1954), The Student Prince (1954) and Vincente Minnelli’s Kismet (1955).
Blyth also portrayed Burt Lancaster’s wife in the gritty prison drama Brute Force (1947) and was an attractive creature from the sea brought home by William Powell in 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, also starring her former teenage dancing partner, Donald O’Connor, and The Helen Morgan Story (1957), in which she played the alcoholic 1930s torch singer opposite Paul Newman.
On loan from Universal, where she played innocent teens in small roles, Blyth, then 16, landed the part of the spoiled Veda opposite Crawford, who had just left MGM with her career in disarray. Hundreds of teenagers had auditioned, but Crawford saw something in Blyth and helped her get the role by appearing opposite her in her screen test.
“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 were correct; for playing the self-sacrificing mother, she won the best actress Oscar (missing the ceremony but famously accepting the trophy at home in bed in her pajamas), and Blyth was nominated for best supporting actress.
Blythe excelled as the beautiful brat who will do anything — even commit murder — for money.
“This Blyth child is exquisite in her understanding of one of the most difficult roles ever written,” The Hollywood Reporter wrote in its review. “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.”
Five days after wrapping Mildred Pierce, Blyth broke her back in a sledding mishap near 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 body cast and several more confined to a wheelchair. She did manage to attend the 1946 Oscars, wearing a studio-designed gown that fit over her back brace.
In the 1970s, Blyth became known to a new generation of TV viewers when she appeared as a mom in a series of commercials for Hostess Cupcakes, pitching Twinkies, Crumb Cakes and Ding Dongs.
Anne Marie Blythe (she shortened her first and last names after coming to Hollywood) was born Aug. 16, 1927, in Mount Kisco, New York, and raised on the Lower East Side on Manhattan. Her father left the family, leaving her mother to raise her and her older sister.
Blyth sang and recited poetry on radio shows starting at age 6 and performed with the San Carlos Opera Company. In the principal’s office at school, she was approached by writer Lillian Hellman and producer-director Herman Shumlin to read for a part in the anti-Nazi Broadway drama Watch on the Rhine. She won the role as Paul Lukas’ daughter in a 1941-42 production, turning 13 during the run.
After Watch on the Rhine closed on Broadway after almost 400 performances, she toured around the country with the play and joined other castmembers for dinner at the White House with President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In 1943, Blyth was signed by Universal in part to provide competition for their chronically dissatisfied resident soprano, Deanna Durbin, and she quickly was cast in four musicals released in 1944: Chip Off the Old Block, Babes on Swing Street, The Merry Monahans and Bowery to Broadway (three of those with O’Connor).
Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce, based on a 1941 novel by James M. Cain, came next, and after her back mended, she played another brat in Swell Guy (1946). A few years later, she refused to play another bad girl in the film Abandoned and was put on unpaid suspension.
Blyth also appeared in such films as Killer McCoy (1947), Another Part of the Forest (1948), Top O’ the Morning (1949), Once More, My Darling (1949), The Golden Horde (1951), I’ll Never Forget You (1951), One Minute to Zero (1952), The World in His Arms (1952), All the Brothers Were Valiant (1953), The King’s Thief (1955) and Slander (1957).
Curtiz’s The Helen Morgan Story was her last feature — she quit the movies even though she was considered for the lead in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), for which Joanne Woodward won the best actress Oscar.
However, she had a nightclub act in Las Vegas, appeared in local theater and appeared on such TV shows as Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone (as a Hollywood star who doesn’t age), The Name of the Game, Quincy M.E. and Murder, She Wrote.
In 1953, Blyth wed Los Angeles obstetrician James McNulty, the brother of singer Dennis Day. They had five children, Timothy, Maureen, Kathleen, Terence and Eileen, and were together until his 2007 death at age 89.
Duane Byrge contributed to this report.
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