The actress, who costarred with Joan Crawford in the 1945 classic, was one of the last surviving stars from Hollywood's Golden Age
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Ann Blyth has reportedly died at the age of 98. One of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood, she was an Oscar nominee for her role opposite Joan Crawford in 1945’s Mildred Pierce.
KABC's George Pennacchio reported Blyth's death on Thursday, June 25. She died on Wednesday, June 24, from "natural causes," Pennacchio reports.
Blyth was born Anne Blythe in Mount Kisco, N.Y., in 1928; she later dropped the "e" from her first and last name. After her father abandoned the family, her mother moved Blyth and her sister to New York City. Blyth began working as a child actor on the radio at 5 years old. At 9, she joined the New York Children's Opera Company.
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"Life was one big struggle then, but mother managed somehow to keep me in parochial school and later in professional school," she told The New York Times in 1952. "She provided me with singing and dramatic lessons besides."
Her first acting role came in 1941’s Watch on the Rhine on Broadway (her only role on the Great White Way). After wrapping up its Broadway run, the show went on tour — and even performed for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. That tour also brought Blyth to Los Angeles, where she signed a contract with Universal.
Her first role came in 1944’s Chip Off the Old Block, a musical comedy, with Donald O’Connor and Peggy Ryan. She followed it up with three similar movies, all of them musicals: The Merry Monahans, Babes on Swing Street and Bowery to Broadway, which all hit theaters in 1944.
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She was then loaned to Warner Bros. to appear in 1945’s Mildred Pierce alongside Crawford, who played the title character. Blyth played Veda, Mildred’s bratty, entitled daughter, and it was diametrically opposed to the sunny, cheerful characters she typically played. Blyth was just 16 years old.
The film received six Oscar nominees, including one for Blyth, and Crawford — who became good friends with Blyth — won best actress for her role.
“She just blew everybody away,” film noir historian Alan Rode told the Los Angeles Times in 2013 of Blyth’s performance. “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.”
“I always had a terrific imagination and the ability to be somebody else,” Blyth told the outlet of her performance. In 1996, Mildred Pierce was selected for preservation in the United States Library of Congress National Film Registry.
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Blyth injured her back in a toboggan accident and spent over a year recovering, limiting her ability to profit off her success in the film. She returned to the screen in 1946’s Swell Guy, but she was deeply affected by her mother’s death during the film's production.
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Blyth continued to work at a blistering pace, appearing in 26 movies in the next 10 years. Those films included 1947’s Killer McCoy, 1949’s Top o' the Morning, 1951’s The Great Caruso, 1954’s Rose Marie and 1955’s Kismet. One of her roles included 1948’s Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid, in which she played the titular (and mute) mermaid.
“I got to be quite the fish, I must say,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1997. “Of course, it was good exercise and there was no gaining weight on that movie.” Blyth’s last film was 1957’s The Helen Morgan Story with Paul Newman.
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After moving away from films, she began appearing more widely in theater productions around the country, including The King and I, The Sound of Music and Show Boat. She also performed in live concerts well into the 1990s. She made a handful of TV appearances, with guest turns on Wagon Train, The Twilight Zone and Quincy, M.E. Her last onscreen acting role came in a 1985 episode of Murder, She Wrote. In 1960, Blyth received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Blyth married James McNulty, a doctor, in 1953. She met him through his brother Dennis Day, who was a singer. The couple were devoutly Catholic and welcomed five children together: Timothy, Maureen, Kathleen, Terence and Eileen. They were married until McNulty’s death in 2007.
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“As an actress I have always believed that the truer challenge, the deeper obligation, begins after the camera stops,” Blyth said in a 1958 issue of Life Magazine. “My role as a woman in my community and in my home has always overshadowed the excitement of any part I have ever played on stage or screen.”
In 2015, author Jacqueline T. Lynch published a biography of the actress. “Ann Blyth is a remarkably versatile talent, adept at drama, comedy, musicals, pretty much anything that was thrown at her,” she told Broadway World in 2017.
But despite her success in Mildred Pierce and in other dramatic roles, Lynch said, “When the publicity department and gossip columnists got hold of the news of her quiet, church-going private life, they put a different spin on her career trajectory, and the studios relegated her to more lightweight roles. I guess they thought it would be hard for the public to accept her in villain roles when they were fed so many stories on her being a nice girl.”
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Lynch continued, “She was as famous as anyone could be in the late 1940s, but today only diehard fans recall the range of magnificent work she did on screen.”
Blyth is survived by her children.
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