Ann Blyth, an actress from Hollywood’s Golden Age who earned an Oscar nomination for playing the ungrateful, manipulative, altogether evil teenage daughter to Joan Crawford’s self-sacrificing mother in the 1945 film “Mildred Pierce,” died on Wednesday in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. She was 98.
Her family announced the death but did not provide further details.
Ms. Blyth was just 17 when she made “Mildred Pierce,” based on James M. Cain’s hard-boiled 1941 novel. She had begun her movie career in innocent-teen roles, and played sharply against type as the coddled, conceited Veda Pierce, who carries on an affair with — and eventually kills — her stepfather (Zachary Scott), and slaps her mother across the face in one indelible scene. She was rewarded with an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress.
Many young actresses auditioned for the part, but Crawford gave Ms. Blyth a boost by appearing with her in her screen test, an unusual bit of generosity for a star of that caliber.
“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,” Ms. Blyth told Scott Feinberg of The Hollywood Reporter in 2013. “People just didn’t do that, not of her stature.”
As Mildred, a single mother clawing her way from the working class to success as a businesswoman to feed her daughter’s insatiable social ambitions, Crawford won the Oscar for best actress, reviving her flagging career. (She stayed home the night of the ceremony, and her award was delivered to her in bed.)
For Ms. Blyth, “Mildred Pierce” was her high point. It was her fifth film, and over the next 12 years she made about two dozen more, of varying quality and genre.
The comedies included “Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid” (1948), a romantic fantasy in which she and William Powell played the title roles, and “Top o’ the Morning” (1949), with Bing Crosby. The dramas included “Killer McCoy” (1947), a boxing story with Mickey Rooney, and “Another Part of the Forest” (1948), based on the Lillian Hellman play that was a prequel of sorts to Hellman’s celebrated stage and film melodrama “The Little Foxes.”
Ms. Blyth made musicals as well, including “The Great Caruso” (1951), with Mario Lanza, and “Kismet” (1955), a Broadway adaptation, with Howard Keel. Her last film was “The Helen Morgan Story” (1957), a musical biography of the alcoholic 1920s torch singer, which also starred a young Paul Newman and was directed, like “Mildred Pierce,” by Michael Curtiz. (Inexplicably, the studio chose to have Ms. Blyth’s singing voice dubbed, even though it was said to be quite similar to Morgan’s.)
She flirted with other roles, including the title part in “The Three Faces of Eve” (1957), for which Joanne Woodward won the best actress Oscar. But instead, at 30, she ended her feature film career to care for her family.
She had married James McNulty — an obstetrician and gynecologist who was the brother of the actor Dennis Day and, like Ms. Blyth, an observant Catholic — in 1953, and they remained married until his death in 2007.
She is survived by their children, Timothy McNulty, Maureen Wheeler, Kathleen Colton, Terence McNulty and Eileen McNulty; 10 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
Anne Marie Blythe was born on Aug. 16, 1927, in Mount Kisco, N.Y., the younger of two daughters of Harry Blythe, a butler born in Bath, England, and Annie (Lynch) Blythe, known as Nan, who was born in County Meath, Ireland.
Her parents divorced soon after she was born, and she grew up in a Manhattan tenement while her mother did odd jobs to scrape by during the Depression.
She made an early start in show business, acting in radio plays when she was about 6, singing with the San Carlo Opera Company and attending the Professional Children’s School in Manhattan. There she was spotted by Herman Shumlin, the theater producer and director, who cast her as Paul Lukas’s daughter in Hellman’s “Watch on the Rhine” in 1941. It was Anne’s first and last Broadway play.
Signing a contract with Universal, she made her movie debut three years later in “Chip Off the Old Block,” a musical comedy starring Donald O’Connor and Peggy Ryan. (She dropped the final letter from her first and last names as her Hollywood career began.)
That was followed by three more musicals featuring Mr. O’Connor, Ms. Ryan or both. Ms. Blyth and Mr. O’Connor later reunited in “The Buster Keaton Story” (1957), in which he played Keaton and she played his wife — actually a composite character based on all three of the women Keaton married.
Her agent felt she had more to offer than just peppy musicals, and pushed hard for her to be cast in “Mildred Pierce.” Soon after finishing the film, though, Ms. Blyth was thrown from a toboggan while sledding. She broke her back and was bedridden for months, followed by a long period in a steel brace. (For the Academy Awards ceremony in March 1946, she wore a gown designed by the studio to cover the brace.)
Though she stopped making features in 1957, she appeared in musical theater, summer stock and concerts, and as a guest on television shows; on “The Twilight Zone” in 1964, she played a secretly immortal movie star. She was, for a time in the 1970s, an advertising spokeswoman for Hostess snacks.
Her final screen role was in a 1985 episode of “Murder, She Wrote”; that show’s star, Angela Lansbury, had, like Ms. Blyth, been nominated for a supporting actress Oscar in 1946, for “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
Ms. Blyth’s career, however brief, was rich — but her thrilling turn in “Mildred Pierce” is likely to be the work for which she is best remembered.
“She just blew everybody away,” the film historian Alan K. Rode told The Los Angeles Times in 2013. “It’s certainly Joan Crawford’s movie, but she is really the spine of the movie. She is the epitome of the film noir daughter from hell. It’s just an amazing performance that stands the test of time.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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