As a teenager, Ann Blyth was nominated for an Academy Award for playing Veda Pierce, the daughter who despises her mother in Mildred Pierce. Within months she was in hospital with a broken back. The film made her a star. The accident decided what kind of star she would get to be.
Blyth died on Wednesday, June 24, 2026, at her home in Rancho Santa Fe, California. She was 98, seven weeks short of her 99th birthday. Her daughter, Eileen McNulty, said she died of natural causes with her family at her side.
A child performer in the Depression
Ann Marie Blyth was born on August 16, 1927, in Mount Kisco, New York. Her father, Harry Blyth, left the family, and her mother, Nan, supported Ann and her older sister, Dorothy, by taking in ironing during the Depression.
Ann was performing on children’s radio by the age of five and stayed on the air for six years. At nine she joined the New York Children’s Opera Company. Her Broadway break came in 1941, when she was cast as Babette in Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine, which ran for 378 performances.
A touring production of the play brought her to the attention of Universal, which signed her. Her first film was the 1944 musical Chip Off the Old Block, alongside Donald O’Connor and Peggy Ryan.
Veda
Universal lent her to Warner Bros. for Mildred Pierce, Michael Curtiz’s adaptation of the James M. Cain novel. Joan Crawford played Mildred, a waitress who builds a restaurant business to give her elder daughter everything. Blyth played that daughter, Veda: snobbish, grasping and contemptuous of the mother who works to keep her.
Crawford won the Oscar for Best Actress. Blyth was nominated for Best Supporting Actress while still a teenager.
The accident
In 1945, while tobogganing at Snow Valley in the mountains of Southern California, Blyth broke her back. The injury kept her from building on the success of Mildred Pierce while the film was still new, at the point when a young actor’s next few roles count most.
She returned to work, and the late 1940s brought parts that used her range. She played the title role in the fantasy Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948), opposite William Powell, and appeared that year in Another Part of the Forest, the film of Hellman’s prequel to The Little Foxes.
The MGM years
Blyth had a trained soprano voice, and the studios eventually put it to use. In The Great Caruso (1951) she played the wife of the tenor Enrico Caruso, opposite Mario Lanza. She signed with MGM in December 1952 and starred in three of its musicals: Rose Marie (1954), The Student Prince (1954) and Vincente Minnelli’s Kismet (1955).
Her last film was The Helen Morgan Story (1957), a biography of the torch singer. She was 30.
After Hollywood
In 1953 she married James McNulty, an obstetrician and the brother of the singer Dennis Day. They had five children: Timothy, Maureen, Kathleen, Terence and Eileen. McNulty died in 2007, aged 89.
Blyth did not stop working when she stopped making films. She sang in stage productions of The King and I, The Sound of Music and Show Boat, took guest roles on television, and in the 1970s became the face of a series of commercials for Hostess. She retired in 1985.
She is survived by her five children, 10 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
She made her last film at 30 and lived almost 70 more years. She is still remembered for a role she played as a teenager.
Sources
- Associated Press via FOX 4: Ann Blyth, Oscar-nominated ‘Mildred Pierce’ actress, dies at 98
- The Washington Post: Ann Blyth, who played wicked daughter in ‘Mildred Pierce’, dies at 98
- The Hollywood Reporter: Ann Blyth, the Evil Daughter in ‘Mildred Pierce’, Dies at 98
- Variety: Ann Blyth, Who Played Joan Crawford’s Daughter in ‘Mildred Pierce’, Dies at 98
- Deadline: Ann Blyth Dead: ‘Mildred Pierce’ Actress Was 98