Anne Bryce, who was nominated for an Oscar in 1946 for her memorable performance as the spoiled and selfish daughter of Joan Crawford’s hard-working and devoted protagonist in the classic film “Mildred Pierce,” died Wednesday. She was 98 years old.
KABC’s George Pennacchio reported her death.
The dark beauty was also noted for roles in the prison drama “Brute Force” (1947), the Mario Lanza vehicle “The Great Caruso” (1951), and 1957’s “The Helen Morgan Story” with Paul Newman.
In an interstitial recorded decades later for Turner Classic Movies, Bryce recalled filming Mildred Pierce with Crawford and asserted that despite their characters’ rocky relationship on screen, she and Crawford were very close and that it was difficult for her to bash him in one of the film’s key scenes.
Crawford won the Oscar for Best Actress for “Mildred Pierce” and was nominated for Best Picture.
Mildred Pierce, based on the novel by James M. Cain, was remade in 2011 by Todd Haynes as an HBO miniseries starring Kate Winslet and Evan Rachel Wood as the ungrateful daughter Veda.
(In 1945, while Blythe was on a short break filming Danger Signal, she broke her hip in a sledding accident and spent a year and a half in a back brace. Universal then replaced her, still confined to a wheelchair, with Burt Lancaster). After she recovered, Universal gave her her first starring role in The Swell Guy. She also starred opposite Mickey Rooney in the film noir Killer McCoy.
The actress had an interesting and challenging role in 1948’s Another Part of the Forest, a prequel to Lillian Hellman’s Little Fox, playing a younger version of Regina Hubard, immortalized in the Bette Davis films.
In the 1950 soap opera “Our Very Own,” Bryce played an adopted child searching for his biological mother, and in “Thunder on the Hill,” she played a woman wrongly convicted of murder. She played the wife of Mario Lanza’s Enrico Caruso in 1951’s The Magnificent Caruso, and also appeared in lighter productions such as Mr. Peabody and the Little Mermaid and Katie Did It. In 1952, she starred opposite Gregory Peck in her final film for Universal, The World in His Arms.
She appeared in a series of operettas at MGM, including Kismet, but the era of grand movie musicals was ending, and she wasn’t the only star whose career suffered as a result.
She had great success playing the tragic title character in 1957’s The Helen Morgan Story, about an alcoholic torch singer. Strangely, her singing voice was dubbed.
Anne Marie Brice was born in Mount Kisco, New York. When her parents divorced, her mother moved Bryce and her sister to New York City when she was young.
At one point, Bryce aspired to a career in opera and trained at the San Carlo Opera Company.
She appeared on Broadway only once, in the original production of Lillian Hellman’s World War II drama Watch on the Lines, from 1941 to 1942. She toured with the show in Los Angeles, where she was noticed and had a screen test at Universal.
The young actress made her screen debut in the 1944 swing-era teen musical “Tip Off the Block.” The musical was a B-grade musical starring Donald O’Connor, in which she performed her pipes. Similar roles followed in the 1944 films Mary Monaghan and Babes of Swing Street. However, she never really gained attention until her role at Warner Bros. “Mildred Pierce” 1945.
A devout Catholic, after essentially ending her film career in 1957, she focused on family as well as musical theater, appearing in The Sound of Music, The King and I, Carnival, Bittersweet, South Pacific, Show Boat, and A Little Night Music.
Bryce began making occasional television appearances in the 1950s, including appearances on “Lux Video Theater” in the 1954 adaptation of “A Place in the Sun,” “The DuPont Show with June Allyson” in 1959, and “Dick Powell Theater” in 1962. She appeared several times in the television western “Wagon Train” and starred in “Queen of the Sun” in the early 1960s. She then appeared on “Quincy, Maine” several times and made her final television appearance in 1985’s “Murder, She Wrote.”
The actress was married to Dr. James McNulty from 1953 until his death in 2007, and they had five children, 10 grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
