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The dark, petulant beauty of this petite American film and musical star worked to her advantage, especially in her early dramatic career. Ann Marie Blyth was born of Irish stock to Harry and Nan Blyth on August 16, 1928, in Mt. Kisco, New York. Her parents split while she was young and she, her mother and sister moved to New York City where the girls attended various Catholic schools. Already determined at an early age to perform, Ann attended Manhattan`s Professional Children`s School and was already a seasoned radio performer, particularly on soap dramas, while in elementary school. A member of New York`s Children`s Opera Company, the young girl made an important Broadway debut as Paul Lukas and Mady Christians` daughter in the classic Lillian Hellman WWII drama "Watch on the Rhine" (1941), billed as Anne (with an extra "e"). She stayed with the show for two years.

While touring with the play in Los Angeles, the teenager was noticed by director Henry Koster at Universal and given a screen test. Signed on as Ann (without the "e") Blyth, the pretty, photographic colleen displayed her warbling talent in her debut film Chip Off the Old Block (1944), a swing-era teen musical starring Universal song-and-dance favorites Donald O`Connor and Peggy Ryan. She followed it pleasantly enough with other "B" tunefests such as The Merry Monahans (1944) and Babes on Swing Street (1944). It wasn`t until Warner Bros. borrowed her to make self-sacrificing mother Joan Crawford`s life pure hell as malicious, spiteful daughter Veda in the classic, Oscar-winning wallow Mildred Pierce (1945) that she really clicked with viewers and set up her dramatic career. With murder on her young character`s mind, Hollywood stood up and took notice of this fresh-faced talent.

Although Ann lost the Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year to another Anne (Anne Revere), she was borrowed again by Warner Bros. to film Danger Signal (1945). During filming, Ann suffered a broken back in a sledding accident while briefly vacationing in Lake Arrowhead and had to be replaced in the role. After a long convalescence (over a year and a half in a back brace) Universal used her in a wheelchair-bound cameo in Brute Force (1947).

Her first starring role was an inauspicious one opposite Sonny Tufts in Swell Guy (1946), but she finally began gaining some momentum again. Instead of offering her musical gifts, she continued her serious streak with Killer McCoy (1947) and a dangerously calculated role in Another Part of the Forest (1948), a prequel to The Little Foxes (1941) in which Ann played the Bette Davis role of Regina at a younger age. Her attempts at lighter comedy were mild at best playing a fetching creature of the sea opposite William Powell in Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid (1948) and a teen infatuated with much-older movie star Robert Montgomery in Once More, My Darling (1949).

At full-throttle as a star in the early 1950s, Ann transitioned easily between glossy operettas, wide-eyed comedies, and all-out melodramas, some of which tended to be overbaked and, thereby, overplayed. When not dishing out the high dramatics of an adopted girl searching for her birth mother in Our Very Own (1950) or wrongly-convicted murderess in Thunder on the Hill (1951), she was introducing classic standards as wife to Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso (1951) or playing pert and perky in such light confections as Katie Did It (1951). A well-embraced romantic leading lady, she made

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