Celeste Holm, a musical comedy star who also showed a flair for dramatic work and won an Academy Award for her sympathetic role in "Gentleman's Agreement," Elia Kazan's influential 1947 film exploring anti-Semitism, died Sunday at her home in New York City. She was 95.
Her great-niece, Amy Phillips, confirmed her death to the Associated Press. Ms. Holm had been hospitalized for dehydration about two weeks ago after a fire in actor Robert De Niro's apartment in the same Manhattan building.
Ms. Holm came to wide attention in 1943 as the lusty Ado Annie Carnes in the original Broadway staging of "Oklahoma!" She sang the show-stopping number "I Cain't Say No," which led critic Burton Rascoe to write at the time that she "simply tucks the show under her arm and lets the others touch it."
Ms. Holm was summoned to Hollywood in 1946 as a musical comedy performer and landed roles in "Carnival in Costa Rica" and "Three Little Girls in Blue," films that did not sustain her interest.
She had a hard time persuading Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century Fox studios, to let her play in "Gentleman's Agreement" until screenwriter Moss Hart came to her defense.
Within a four-year period, she received three supporting Oscar nominations, including her win, for "Gentleman's Agreement," "Come to the Stable" (1949) and "All About Eve" (1950).
In "Gentleman's Agreement," she was the glamorous but long-suffering fashion editor with a yen for an investigative reporter, played by Gregory Peck. The film was one of the first major pictures to expose anti-Semitism in everyday society and won Oscars for best picture and best director.
"All About Eve," a highly literate drama about ambition, featured Ms. Holm as the sincere best friend of an aging actress played by Bette Davis. The film won best picture and director Oscars.
Ms. Holm often described a tense relationship with Zanuck, who was displeased with her choosiness in film roles. Her rows with Zanuck earned her unflattering comparisons in Hollywood to the independent-minded Davis. MGM, fearing similar troubles with Ms. Holm, almost didn't cast her in such mid-1950s musicals as "The Tender Trap" and "High Society" until co-star Frank Sinatra intervened.
Sinatra knew that Ms. Holm's reputation for quality work elevated those around her, said film historian Jeanine Basinger.
"She's the classic example of a Broadway actress who, when she did do film, her impact was huge," Basinger said.
Ms. Holm was born in New York on April 29, 1917, to an insurance executive father and a portrait painter mother.
After ballet and voice training, she worked in summer stock and received a significant part on Broadway in "The Time of Your Life" (1939), William Saroyan's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama.
Despite her critical success in Hollywood, she asked for release from her studio contract in 1950 to return to Broadway. In a space of a few years, she played a contemporary Washingtonian in Louis Verneuil's comedy "Affairs of State"; Anna, an English governess, in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The King and I"; and the title tramp in Eugene O'Neill's "Anna Christie."
She often appeared opposite her fourth husband, actor Wesley Addy.
Her marriages to Ralph Nelson, Francis Davies and A. Schuyler Dunning ended in divorce. Addy died in 1996.
In 2004, she married her fifth husband, opera singer Frank Basile. He survives, along with a son from her first marriage and a son from her third marriage.
Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1925550/news/1925550/
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