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Ann Blyth, the actress who earned an Academy Award nomination for portraying Joan Crawford’s manipulative and deceitful teenage daughter in the 1945 classic Mildred Pierce, died Wednesday at the age of 98, according to media reports.
Blyth, who trained as an opera singer and enjoyed a career spanning film musicals, dramas and even fantasy comedies, died of natural causes, the reports said.
In Mildred Pierce, Blyth delivered a standout performance as Veda, Crawford’s ambitious, hateful and ultimately murderous daughter. The character competes with her own mother for the affection of the same man — her stepfather, played by Zachary Scott. One of the film’s most memorable scenes features Blyth slapping Crawford across the face, knocking her to the floor.
“Get out before I kill you,” Crawford’s character warns her daughter in a moment of fury.
Blyth appeared in more than 30 films during a Hollywood career that lasted from 1944 to 1957. She was only 16 years old when she gave the acclaimed performance that became her signature role in Mildred Pierce. The film also earned Crawford the only Academy Award of her career.
The movie was directed by Michael Curtiz, whose celebrated credits include Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Yankee Doodle Dandy.
“He had a great confidence in me, which in turn helped me,” Blyth told the Los Angeles Times in 2013, reflecting on Curtiz.
“She just blew everybody away,” film historian Alan Rode told the newspaper. “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.”
Mildred Pierce was both a critical and commercial success, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture. Crawford won the Oscar for Best Actress, while Blyth and co-star Eve Arden were both nominated for Best Supporting Actress but did not win.
Blyth’s career lost momentum after Mildred Pierce when she suffered a broken back in a toboggan accident.
Her versatility allowed her to excel in a wide range of roles, from musicals such as Kismet (1955) and The Student Prince (1954), to adventure epics including The Golden Horde (1951), comedies like Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid(1948) opposite William Powell, and dramas such as One Minute to Zero (1952) with Robert Mitchum.
The petite brunette actress also shared the screen with many of Hollywood’s leading men, including Burt Lancaster in Brute Force (1947), Mickey Rooney in Killer McCoy (1947), Bing Crosby in Top o’ the Morning (1949), Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso (1951), Gregory Peck in The World in His Arms (1952) and Paul Newman in The Helen Morgan Story (1957), which marked her final feature film.
Blessed with a beautiful soprano voice, Blyth performed on the operatic stage early in her career and became a natural fit for movie musicals. However, in The Helen Morgan Story, the studio chose to dub her singing voice with another performer.
Following her final film, Blyth made occasional television appearances, including a role on The Twilight Zone in 1964. Her last on-screen credit came in Murder, She Wrote in 1985.
Ann Marie Blyth was born on Aug. 16, 1928, in Mount Kisco, New York. She trained as both a singer and actress from childhood. While touring Los Angeles as a teenager with a Broadway production, she was offered a screen test that launched her Hollywood career.
Blyth is survived by the five children she shared with her husband, James McNulty, who died in 2007.
