Ann Blyth, Oscar-Nominated Mildred Pierce Star, Dies at 98

Ann Blyth played one of the nastiest daughters in movie history, then spent the next 70 years being nothing like her. The actress, who earned an Oscar nomination at 16 for the 1945 film noir Mildred Pierce, died on June 24, 2026. She was 98, less than two months short of her 99th birthday.

According to KABC reporter George Pennacchio, Blyth died peacefully of natural causes at her home in Rancho Mirage, California, surrounded by her children. No long illness was reported. She was one of the very last stars left from the Golden Age of Hollywood, a performer who could act, sing opera, and carry a Broadway show, and she did all three for decades.

The Role That Made Her Famous and Infamous

If you know one Ann Blyth performance, it's Veda Pierce. In Mildred Pierce, she played the spoiled, scheming, eventually murderous daughter of Joan Crawford's hardworking title character. The two actresses despise each other on screen. Veda is greedy, snobby, and cruel to the mother who gives her everything. It is one of the great movie villains, and a teenager pulled it off.

Crawford won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the film. Blyth landed a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, making her one of the youngest people ever nominated in that category. A 1945 review in The Hollywood Reporter called her "exquisite in her understanding of one of the most difficult roles ever written." Not bad for a 16-year-old on loan from another studio.

Joan Crawford Did Her Screen Test, And That Mattered

Plenty of young actresses wanted the part of Veda. Blyth got it partly because Crawford herself showed up and ran the screen test with her, which big stars almost never did. Years later, Blyth said that small act of generosity changed everything.

"I knew that other people wanted the part as well but I was the lucky one because Joan Crawford did the test with me, and it made a world of difference," she recalled in 2013. "People just didn't do that, not people of her stature." Off camera, the two actresses got along fine. The bitterness lived only on the screen.

She Broke Her Back Five Days After Filming Wrapped

Here's a detail most people don't know. Five days after she finished shooting Mildred Pierce, Blyth broke her back in a tobogganing accident in the mountains near Lake Arrowhead, California. She was 5-foot-2 and full of energy, and one wrong trip down a hill changed her year.

She spent seven months in a body cast and several more months in a wheelchair. The injury could have ended a young career before it started. It didn't. When the 1946 Academy Awards rolled around, she showed up anyway, wearing a gown the studio designed to fit right over her back brace. That kind of grit followed her through her whole life.

The Trained Opera Singer Behind the Villain

People forget Blyth was a serious singer. She trained as an operatic soprano, and once she signed a long-term contract with MGM, the studio put that voice to real work. In 1951, she played Enrico Caruso's wife opposite Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso, one of the biggest box office hits of the year. In it, she introduced the standard "The Loveliest Night of the Year," a song people still hum today.

MGM kept casting her in musicals after that. She starred in Rose Marie (1954), The Student Prince (1954), and Vincente Minnelli's Kismet (1955). Unlike a lot of stars who needed their singing dubbed, Blyth could actually hold her own against the grand opera the films aimed for. That made her one of the studio's top stars of the era.

From Children's Radio to Dinner With FDR

Blyth was born Anne Marie Blythe in Mount Kisco, New York. Her father left the family when she was young, and her mother raised her and her older sister on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. To keep the lights on, her mother took in boarders and did other families' laundry. "Life was one big struggle then, but mother managed somehow to keep me in parochial school," Blyth said in 1952.

She started performing on children's radio shows around age 5 or 6, reciting poetry and singing. At 9 she joined a New York opera company. In 1941, she landed a role in Lillian Hellman's anti-fascist Broadway play Watch on the Rhine, which ran nearly 400 performances. She toured the country with the cast and was even invited to the White House, where she dined with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. While the show played Los Angeles, Universal signed her to a contract. She dropped the "e" off her name and became Ann Blyth.

She Was Way More Than One Wicked Daughter

A lot of actors get typecast after a villain that good. Blyth refused to let it happen. She played Burt Lancaster's wife in the rough prison drama Brute Force (1947). She played an actual mermaid that William Powell brings home in the fantasy Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948). She worked alongside Charles Boyer, Mario Lanza, and a young Paul Newman in her final feature, The Helen Morgan Story (1957), directed by Michael Curtiz, the same man who made Mildred Pierce.

She nearly grabbed an even bigger part, too. She was considered for the lead in The Three Faces of Eve (1957), the role that won Joanne Woodward the Best Actress Oscar. After the movies slowed down, Blyth kept working on television for decades. She turned up on Wagon Train, Quincy M.E., and Murder, She Wrote, and she had a memorable spot on The Twilight Zone as a Hollywood star who refuses to age. She also ran a nightclub act in Las Vegas. The woman did not sit still.

A Marriage That Lasted More Than 50 Years

In 1953, Blyth married Dr. James McNulty, a Los Angeles obstetrician who happened to be the brother of singer Dennis Day. They had five children together: Timothy, Maureen, Kathleen, Terence, and Eileen. The marriage stuck. They were together until McNulty died in 2007 at age 89, more than half a century after they wed.

By every account from people who knew her, she was the opposite of Veda Pierce. Co-stars and crew described her as warm, gracious, devoutly religious, and a devoted mother. She is survived by her five children, 10 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.

She Answered Every Piece of Fan Mail Herself

One small thing says a lot about her. Even in her later years, Blyth personally answered all of her fan mail. Her family said she was genuinely grateful that people still wrote to her at all. That's a long way from the cold, calculating teenager who made her famous.

Her work is going nowhere. Mildred Pierce earned six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and in 1996 it was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress National Film Registry. Blyth has her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Across more than 30 films and seven decades of stage and television work, she built a career that spanned the entire Golden Age and outlasted nearly all of it. The villain on screen, the gentlewoman off it. That's the part she got exactly right.