Joan Crawford was never likely to be voted mother of the year once her daughter Christina wrote Mommie Dearest, a memoir alleging physical and psychological abuse. Among the friends and former colleagues who sprang to her defence after the book’s publication in 1978 was Ann Blyth, who at the age of 17 played Crawford’s headstrong and resentful screen daughter Veda in the noir melodrama Mildred Pierce (1945).
The film, adapted from the novel by James M Cain, was nominated for six Oscars, including one for Blyth as best supporting actress. She called her veteran co-star “the kindest, most helpful human being I’ve ever worked with”. That kindness began during the audition process. “[She] did the test with me, and it made a world of difference,” she said in 2013. “People just didn’t do that. Not of her stature.”
Blyth, who has died aged 98, was far from a shoo-in for the part. She was three years into a seven-year contract with Universal, which meant she would need to be loaned out to Warner Bros, the studio behind Mildred Pierce. She was also vying with talented contemporaries for the part; the producer Jerry Wald hoped to cast Shirley Temple, though that suggestion was vetoed by the director Michael Curtiz.
The biggest obstacle was Blyth’s own image. Collier’s magazine noted that “if she does not wear a visible halo … [she deserves] at least a merit badge for angelic behaviour”. Hiring her to play Veda, an irredeemable bad seed, would be casting against type.
It was a gamble that paid off. Blyth’s ability to expose and explore the character’s spiteful underside was revelatory for anyone who had seen her in the mostly anodyne parts that were put her way at Universal.
Veda, an incorrigible snob, cannot brook the embarrassment of Mildred working in a diner. “My mother, a waitress?” she exclaims in disgust when she discovers the secret that has been hidden from her. Outraged, Mildred slaps her. Later in the film, Veda levels the score. At the end of an argument during which she has branded her mother “a common frump”, and Mildred has torn up a cheque that Veda acquired by subterfuge, the daughter knocks her mother to the ground. The screen throbs with pain, and no wonder: neither of the slaps were faked.
She was born Anne Blythe (later shedding the “e” from both names when she began acting) in Mount Kisco, New York. Her parents were Harry, who left the family home when she was a child, and Annie (nee Lynch), who raised her and her elder sister in New York City while working several jobs, including one in a beauty salon.
As well as St Patrick’s school, Manhattan, she went to the Professional Children’s school, whose alumni included Ida Lupino and Donald O’Connor.
Having displayed an aptitude for singing and drama from an early age, Blyth made her professional radio debut at five years old. At nine, she joined the New York Children’s Opera Company. At 13, she made her only Broadway appearance in Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine. She was in the show when it was staged at the White House for Franklin D Roosevelt. Present at another performance was a talent scout for Universal.
Soon, she was appearing in a string of inoffensive comic musicals including Chip Off the Old Block and The Merry Monahans (both 1944), which co-starred O’Connor and Peggy Ryan.
Mildred Pierce seemed destined to put her career on an exciting new track. Five days after shooting finished, however, Blyth broke her back while tobogganing in the San Bernardino mountains. Though she defied predictions that she would not walk again, it was more than a year before she returned to the screen in Swell Guy (1946). Though only 17, valuable momentum had been lost. To make matters worse, her mother died shortly before her 18th birthday, leaving her in the care of an aunt and uncle.
According to Jacqueline T Lynch, author of Ann Blyth: Actress Singer Star, Blyth initially followed Mildred Pierce by playing “troubled young women with chips on their shoulders, axes to grind, or evil plots to hatch” before changing course to avoid typecasting. Having made the leap from nice to nasty, she reverted for the most part to her original comfort zone.
It was all light and no shade in Mr Peabody and the Mermaid (1948), in which Blyth was the mute, mythical sea creature caught by a fisherman (William Powell), and the musical Top o’ the Morning (1949) with Bing Crosby. One anomaly during this period was Douglas Sirk’s noir thriller Thunder on the Hill (1951), in which Blyth played a killer on her way to prison.
In the same year, she starred opposite Tyrone Power in I’ll Never Forget You, a time-travel love story shot in colour but bookended with black-and-white sequences a la The Wizard of Oz. Also in 1951, she played Dorothy Park Benjamin, wife of the operatic tenor Enrico Caruso (Mario Lanza), in the tear-jerking biopic The Great Caruso.
Blyth was due to be reunited with Lanza in The Student Prince (1954), and the pair had even recorded their songs for the soundtrack. But when Lanza walked off the set and was subsequently fired, he was replaced by the British-born Edmund Purdom.
Her other films included Vincente Minnelli’s musical Kismet (1955) with Howard Keel, and The Buster Keaton Story (1957) with O’Connor in the title role and Blyth as his fictionalised wife. (Keaton was in fact married three times.)
Curtiz cast her in the lead as the Prohibition-era torch singer in The Helen Morgan Story (1957), which was to be her last film. She carried on acting for nearly three decades in summer stock theatre productions and in guest spots on television series including episodes of The Twilight Zone in 1964 and Murder, She Wrote in 1985. The latter became her final screen appearance.
Her husband, the obstetrician James McNulty, died in 2007. Blyth is survived by their children, Timothy, Maureen, Kathleen, Terence and Eileen.
• Ann Blyth (Anne Marie Blythe), actor, born 16 August 1927; died 24 June 2026
