Ann Blyth, a Hollywood actress who earned an Oscar nomination in her teens for playing Joan Crawford’s venomous screen daughter in “Mildred Pierce” (1945) and emerged in adulthood as a lyric soprano star of 1950s movie musicals opposite Mario Lanza and Howard Keel, died June 24 in Rancho Santa Fe, California. She was 98.
Her family announced the death in a statement shared by entertainment reporter George Pennacchio.
On radio and the operatic stage since childhood, Ms. Blyth made her Broadway debut in Lillian Hellman’s hit anti-Nazi play “Watch on the Rhine” in 1941 and came to the attention of a prominent Hollywood producer two years later while in Los Angeles with the touring cast.
She began her film career at Universal Pictures in a series of swing-era teen musicals with the rubber-faced comic actor Donald O’Connor. “Chip Off the Old Block” and “The Merry Monahans” (both 1944) did little to prepare audiences, however, for the Ms. Blyth they would meet the next year in “Mildred Pierce.”
A hard-boiled melodrama based loosely on the novel by James M. Cain, “Mildred Pierce” starred Crawford as a struggling waitress who becomes a restaurant tycoon. Her daughter Veda (Ms. Blyth), a pretentious brat who resents her mother’s humble origins, schemes to run away with her stepfather (Zachary Scott). Veda kills the scoundrel in a fit of rage, and Mildred — in a final act of self-sacrifice — tries to take the blame.
Ms. Blyth said her agent, sensing her untapped versatility, pushed her to try out for the part. She said she beat out more established young stars such as Shirley Temple because of her combustible chemistry with Crawford, whom she smacked in the jaw in a pivotal scene.
“I was the lucky one because Joan Crawford did the test with me, and it made a world of difference,” she told the Hollywood Reporter decades later. “People just didn’t do that, not of her stature.”
Crawford, who was sorely in need of a success after a string of box-office disappointments, won the Academy Award for best actress. Ms. Blyth and Eve Arden, who played Mildred’s friend, were nominated for their supporting roles; the film was also nominated for best picture.
Ms. Blyth was a teenager during filming and was attending classes at the studio schoolhouse. A few years later, a journalist observed of her apparent innocence: “Her most violent outburst is a mild ‘darn,’ and even this causes her to blush.” Interviewers asked Ms. Blyth — who said she grew up in a warm, protective, Catholic home — how she summoned Veda’s sexual intrigue and social snobbery.
“You remember now that I started very young,” she told film historian Eddie Muller in 2007. “I think any time you’ve played any kind of a part, you are learning something about your craft, no matter what the part is. So I think you just dig down into your deeper self, and we all have a deeper darker place. Isn’t it wonderful that I play these parts and let all of that come out that way just for fun? And really not hurt anybody? That’s the best.”
The Oscar nod vaulted Ms. Blyth to the front ranks of promising young actors, but her career was sidelined for more than a year after she fractured her back in a toboggan accident. She said some doctors initially told her she would never walk again. In “Brute Force” (1947), a prison-break movie starring Burt Lancaster, she made a cameo in a wheelchair as his girlfriend.
She also had dramatic roles in “Killer McCoy” (1947), with Mickey Rooney as a boxer; “Another Part of the Forest” (1948), a turgid prequel to “The Little Foxes” in which she played Bette Davis’s evil Regina Hubbard as a younger woman; and “Thunder on the Hill” (1951) as a convicted murderer whose guilt is thrown into doubt.
Continuing to appear opposite some of the biggest stars of the era, Ms. Blyth also starred in “I’ll Never Forget You” (1951), a time-travel story with Tyrone Power, and “The World in His Arms” (1952) as a 19th-century Russian countess who bewitches Gregory Peck’s American sea captain. Dressed in scales, she did not utter a word and still charmed William Powell in the comedy hit “Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid” (1948).
Returning to her singing roots, Ms. Blyth briefly challenged Kathryn Grayson as Hollywood’s reigning operatic star of the 1950s in a passel of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio musicals, among them “The Great Caruso” (1951) with Lanza, “The Student Prince” (1954) with Edmund Purdom (and Lanza’s singing voice) and “Rose Marie” (1954) and “Kismet” (1955), both with Keel.
The grand-scale Technicolor musical was largely on the wane, and Ms. Blyth was released from her MGM movie contract in 1956. She reunited with O’Connor the next year for “The Buster Keaton Story,” a wan biopic of the silent-film comedian. She then turned down what she considered the far-fetched role of a woman with multiple-personality disorder in “The Three Faces of Eve” (1957), a part that earned newcomer Joanne Woodward an Oscar for best actress.
Instead, Ms. Blyth ended her film career as the alcoholic 1920s torch singer in “The Helen Morgan Story” (1957), for which her operatic voice was dubbed by jazz and pop performer Gogi Grant.
On the cusp of 30, she returned to the stage, which she said was less demanding and allowed her time to raise five children.
Anne Marie Blythe — she dropped the Es at the start of her career — was born in Mount Kisco, N.Y., on Aug. 16, 1927, to Irish Catholic parents who soon separated. She grew up with her mother and an older sister in Manhattan. Her mother, who died of cancer when Ann was 18, scrimped to keep her in parochial school and pay for lessons at the Professional Children’s School for aspiring young actors and singers.
Ms. Blyth sang with a children’s opera company and acted on radio soap operas. She said her breakthrough occurred when she was having lunch at the professional school and was summoned to the principal’s office.
“I thought, ‘Now what have I done?’ ” she told Muller. Hellman and Broadway producer Herman Shumlin were scouting for the role of Babette in “Watch on the Rhine” and wanted Ms. Blyth to audition; Janis Wilson played the child role in the 1943 film version.
In 1953, Ms. Blyth wed obstetrician James McNulty, the brother of the singer and Jack Benny radio and TV show regular Dennis Day. McNulty died in 2007. Survivors include her children, Timothy, Maureen, Kathleen, Terence and Eileen; 10 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.
After leaving movies, Ms. Blyth spent decades on the concert and cabaret circuit and appeared in TV series such as “Burke’s Law” in the 1960s and “Murder, She Wrote” in the 1980s. She was involved in Catholic charitable groups.
Ms. Blyth’s friend, the late actor Roddy McDowall, once described her as a “great introvert.” She was coy about early off-screen romances, loath to gossip about stars of Hollywood’s golden age, and patiently understanding of mercurial colleagues such as Crawford and Lanza.
Of Robert Mitchum, she recalled only his practical jokes — and her pride in keeping a straight face on the set of the Cold War drama “One Minute to Zero” (1952).
One gag, she said involved a rubber chicken that Mitchum had asked a prop man to throw from the rafters at the appointed moment when he, in character, fires a gun.
“It was a fairly serious scene, rather melodramatic,” Ms. Blyth said, “and we were going along nicely when I hear this bang and this chicken comes down. I kept right on going with my lines.”
Stella Canino-Quiñones contributed to this report.
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