Ann Blyth, who was nominated for an Academy Award for playing the wicked, manipulative daughter in the 1945 noir melodrama “Mildred Pierce,” has died at age 98.
Announced by her family, her death occurred in Rancho Santa Fe. No further details were given.
Just 17 years old when she shot the part in “Mildred Pierce,” the petite Blythe brought big-scale venom to the role of Veda, the resentful, murderous daughter of the hard-working title character played by Joan Crawford. Blyth’s facility with the mean-girl role caused many at the time to refer to her as “a young Bette Davis.”
An adaptation of the 1941 novel by James M. Cain, directed by Michael Curtiz, the film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture, with Crawford winning for her lead performance.
Asked about the role by The Times in 2013 and the depth of her performance at such a young age, Blythe said simply, “I always had a terrific imagination and the ability to be somebody else.”
Film noir historian Alan Rode said of Blythe in the film, “She just blew everybody away. 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.”
Shortly after finishing “Mildred Pierce,” in April 1945, while shooting “Danger Signal,” Blythe broke her back when a toboggan on which she was riding overturned. It took more than a year for her to recover and get back to work — she attended the Oscars ceremony in a dress designed to hide her back brace — returning to the screen in 1946’s “Swell Guy.”
“It might have been so much worse,” she said of the accident in a 1946 interview.
Born Anne Marie Blythe — she would drop the final letter of her first and last names for show business — on Aug. 16, 1927, in Mount Kisco, NY, to an English father and an Irish mother, her parents split up shortly after she was born.
She began appearing on the radio as a child and debuted on Broadway in “Watch on the Rhine” in 1941.
Soon having made her way to Hollywood, Blyth’s relatively brief film career saw her working with many top stars, including Donald O’Connor in her screen debut “Chip off the Old Block,” Burt Lancaster in “Brute Force,” Mickey Rooney in “Killer McCoy,” Bing Crosby in “Top o’ the Morning,” Mario Lanza in “The Great Caruso,” Gregory Peck in “The World in His Arms,” Robert Mitchum in “One Minute to Zero” and a young Paul Newman in her last film “The Helen Morgan Story.”
Blythe retired from film acting in 1957, but she continued to act and sing onstage and on television. Among her TV credits were “The Twilight Zone” and “Murder, She Wrote,” her final screen appearance.
Blythe married James McNulty, a doctor, in 1953, and the two remained together until his death in 2007. She is survived by their five children, Timothy McNulty, Maureen Wheeler, Kathleen Colton, Terence McNulty and Eileen McNulty, as well as 10 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
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