Celeste Holm, who soared to Broadway fame in Oklahoma! and won an Oscar in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), has died aged 95.
In a career that spanned more than half a century, Ms Holm played everyone from Ado Annie − the girl who just can’t say no in Oklahoma! − to a worldly theatrical agent in the 1991 comedy I Hate Hamlet to Bette Davis’s best friend in All About Eve (1950).
She won the Academy Award in 1947 for best supporting actress for her performance in Gentleman’s Agreement and received Oscar nominations for Come to the Stable (1949) and All About Eve (1950).
Ms Holm was also known for her untiring charity work − at one time she served on nine boards.
But late in her life she was caught up in a bitter, multi-year legal family battle that pitted her two sons against her and her fifth husband − former waiter Frank Basile, more than 45 years her junior, whom she married on her 87th birthday in 2004.
The court fight over investments and inheritance wiped away much of her savings and left her dependent on social security.
The actress and her sons no longer spoke and she was sued for overdue maintenance and legal fees on her Manhattan apartment.
The future Broadway star was born in New York on April 29, 1919, the daughter of Norwegian-born Theodore Holm, who worked for the American branch of Lloyd’s of London, and Jean Parke Holm, a painter and writer.
Her first Broadway success came in 1939 in the cast of William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life. But it was her creation of the role of man-crazy Ado Annie Carnes in the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! in 1943 that really impressed the critics.
The slender, blue-eyed blonde moved west to pursue a film career.
“Hollywood is a good place to learn how to eat a salad without smearing your lipstick,” she would say.
“Oscar Hammerstein told me, ‘You won’t like it’... and he was right,” she said. “Hollywood was just too artificial. The values are entirely different. That balmy climate is so deceptive.”
She returned to New York after several years.
Her well-known films included The Tender Trap (1955) and High Society (1956).
Ms Holm was married five times and is survived by two sons and three grandchildren.
She lived in the same New York building as Hollywood icon Robert De Niro, on Central Park West. The Los Angeles Times reported that she was hospitalised for dehydration following a fire in the building.
But she asked her husband to bring take her home on Friday and spent the last day or two with him and other relatives and close friends by her side, before dying in the early hours of Sunday.
Mr Basile, 49, told the New York Post before she died that she had heart problems.