Ann Blyth, Who Made Veda Pierce Hollywood's Most Hateable Daughter, Dies at 98

She was 17 years old, and she stole a picture from Joan Crawford.

The monster who made a career

In 1945, a teenager named Ann Blyth walked onto a Warner Bros. soundstage and played Veda Pierce — the vain, scheming, operatically cruel daughter at the heart of Mildred Pierce, Michael Curtiz's adaptation of James M. Cain's Los Angeles novel — without a single moment of softening. She earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Blyth died June 25 in Rancho Santa Fe, California, at 98; her death was attributed to natural causes, The Hollywood Reporter reported. She was among the last surviving stars of Hollywood's Golden Age.

A Glendale noir, an L.A. story

Cain's tale is as Angeleno as a Santa Ana wind: Mildred Pierce, played by Crawford in the role of her career, builds a Glendale restaurant empire from nothing, only to see it consumed by the daughter who despises her for it. The film moves from Glendale to Pasadena to the coast, mapping Los Angeles class anxiety with a surveyor's precision — and Veda is its engine of destruction. Blyth later recalled that Crawford herself read lines with her during the screen test, an unusual generosity, as noted by the Washington Post.

Beyond Veda

She refused to be defined by one landmark villainy. In 1947 she appeared in Jules Dassin's brutal prison noir Brute Force, completing scenes while recovering from a serious back injury. By the early 1950s she had reinvented herself as a leading lady of the MGM musical, her trained soprano a genuine asset: she introduced "The Loveliest Night of the Year" opposite Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso (1951) and starred in Rose Marie, The Student Prince and Kismet. Her most ambitious later dramatic turn came in The Helen Morgan Story (1957), opposite Paul Newman. Television followed, and — improbably — a long run of Hostess snack-cake commercials introduced her warmth to viewers who never knew she had once been American cinema's most odious young woman.

A long life in and around Los Angeles

Born August 16, 1927, Blyth made her Broadway debut as a child in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine, and a touring production of that play brought her west. In 1953 she married the Los Angeles obstetrician James McNulty and gradually stepped back from full-time film work to raise five children; McNulty died in 2007. She arrived in this city as a child and stayed the better part of seven decades. Los Angeles has reason to claim her — even if Veda Pierce would have claimed no one.