Ann Sothern, a deft comedian and talented singer who was known as the Queen of the B's at Columbia and RKO, where she made 18 movies between 1934 and 1936, died on Thursday at her home in Ketchum, Idaho. She was 92.
Perhaps never the star she might have been, Ms. Sothern was nevertheless one of the shrewdest actresses around. Her astuteness would eventually lead to her ownership of two early television series, ''Private Secretary'' and ''The Ann Sothern Show.''
In 1938 Ms. Sothern ditched her blond ingénue image and stormed Hollywood's greatest studio, MGM, only to be stuck in a wildly successful series of 10 movies about a tough, scatterbrained, down-on-her-luck Brooklyn chorus girl with a heart of gold, Maisie Ravier.
''Maisie'' (1939), which had been bought for Jean Harlow and then shelved when Harlow died, was an instant phenomenon. Letters addressed to ''Maisie, U.S.A.'' had no trouble being delivered. After ''Congo Maisie'' (1940), ''Gold Rush Maisie'' (1940), ''Ringside Maisie'' (1941) and ''Maisie Was a Lady'' (1941) and between ''Swing Shift Maisie'' (1943) and ''Undercover Maisie'' (1947), Ms. Sothern begged the studio head, Louis B. Mayer, to allow her to quit the series. Mr. Mayer always answered: ''No. Your movies pay for our mistakes.''
Through bad luck or fate, Ms. Sothern was never more than a minor star: ''a Hollywood princess,'' she once said, ''not a Hollywood queen.''
Joseph Mankiewicz, the Academy Award-winning director who cast Ms. Sothern in her best role, as the soap opera-writing wife of Kirk Douglas in ''A Letter to Three Wives'' (1949), said of her: ''Poor Annie. Annie was a damned good Broadway musical comedy actress. She had the sexiest mouth any woman ever had. But, at Metro, poor Annie got stuck in the Sam Katz unit. She never got the big break Gene Kelly and others did, of being with the Arthur Freed steamroller of talent.''
Ms. Sothern got a few chances to show off her her talent, her timing and her figure in MGM musicals, most notably ''Lady Be Good'' (1941) and in the Ethel Merman role in the film version of the Cole Porter musical comedy ''Panama Hattie'' (1942). And she got good reviews as a hard-boiled ex-waitress pressed into service as a nurse and doomed when the island of Bataan was conquered by the Japanese in the World War II drama ''Cry Havoc'' (1943). But it would be 35 years after ''Cry Havoc'' before she earned her sole Academy Award nomination.
In 1988, at the age of 79, she was nominated for an Oscar as best supporting actress for her performance as Lillian Gish's optimistic friend and neighbor in the 1987 drama of old age, ''The Whales of August.''
A few months before the nominations were announced, Ms. Sothern told an interviewer that her chances were dismal. ''I think Hollywood has been terrible to me,'' she said. ''Hollywood doesn't respond to a strong woman, not at all. I was too independent. How dare a woman be competitive or produce her own shows?''
Like her friend Lucille Ball, Ms. Sothern turned early to television. In their B-movie days at RKO, the two actresses had cried on each other's shoulders, with Ms. Sothern complaining that she got all the roles Katharine Hepburn did not want and Ms. Ball saying that she got all the parts Ms. Sothern did not want.
Ms. Sothern was savvy enough to produce ''Private Secretary,'' and to demand that the situation comedy be shot on film, to preserve it. As Susie McNamera, private secretary to a New York talent agent, Ms. Sothern became a heroine to secretaries all over America. The show alternated Sunday nights on CBS with ''The Jack Benny Show'' from February 1953 to September 1957.
When Ms. Sothern quarreled with the show's other producer over her right to take on movie roles, she left the series and sold her 104 episodes for well over $1 million. She immediately returned to CBS in ''The Ann Sothern Show'' as the assistant manager of a swanky New York hotel. Lucille Ball, as Lucy Ricardo, was a guest star on the first episode, and Ms. Sothern returned the favor several times as the Countess Framboise on ''I Love Lucy.'' In 1989, 28 years after ''The Ann Sothern Show'' went off the air, the actress sold the rights to the cable channel Nickelodeon, where the show became an unexpected hit.
Ann Sothern was born Harriette Lake on Jan. 22, 1909, in Valley City, N.D., where her mother, a concert singer, was on tour. She was the eldest of the three daughters of Walter and Annette Yde-Lake. Of Danish stock, she was raised in Minnesota by her mother and grandmother after her father, a meat salesman and womanizer, deserted the family when she was 5.
At 16 she was named the outstanding high school composer in Minnesota and sent to Detroit to represent Minnesota in a national contest. She spent a year at the University of Washington before joining her mother, who was a singing teacher in Hollywood. When half a dozen bit parts in movies got her nowhere, she tried Broadway with somewhat more success.
Florenz Ziegfeld offered her a part in ''Smiles'' with Marilyn Miller, but the star considered the 20-year-old Ms. Sothern too much competition and had her fired after the Boston tryout. In 1931 she played the ingenue in ''Everybody's Welcome,'' the play that introduced the song ''As Time Goes By''; she then toured for seven months in the George S. Kaufman-Morrie Ryskind-Ira and George Gershwin musical ''Of Thee I Sing.'' After the tour ended she took over the same role on Broadway, replacing Lois Moran. And Hollywood noticed.
She was signed by Columbia Studios, which changed her name to Ann Sothern and her hair color from red to platinum blond. From ''Let's Fall in Love'' in 1933 through ''The Hell Cat,'' ''Blind Date'' and ''Kid Millions'' with Eddie Cantor in 1934, the Maurice Chevalier musical ''Folies-Bergère'' in 1935 and a dozen more lightweight but pleasant musicals and comedies, she bubbled and sang.
Married to the bandleader Rogert Pryor and living in a huge rented house in Beverly Hills, she decided she had had enough of B movies. ''I found a much smaller house in Hollywood,'' she recalled. ''We lived cautiously, not as extravagantly, for a year. I was just so sick of those pictures, I decided I wasn't going to do them anymore.''
After making seven movies in 1937, she was off the screen until 1939, when she returned with fourth billing in an A movie, MGM's ''Trade Winds,'' as Fredric March's manipulative secretary. When he saw ''Trade Winds,'' Walter Ruben, the producer of ''Maisie,'' refused to cast one of MGM's contract actresses as Maisie; he insisted on Ann Sothern for the role that would define her career for the next decade.
In 1950, with her MGM contract coming to an end, she collapsed on the ski slopes at Sun Valley, Idaho, with a near-fatal case of hepatitis and was in and out of hospitals for a year. She had divorced Pryor in 1942. In 1943 she married the actor Robert Sterling and had a daughter. That marriage also ended in divorce.
Her movie career was essentially over, too, although she had solid parts in Gore Vidal's satirical political drama, ''The Best Man,'' and the Olivia de Havilland thriller ''Lady in a Cage,'' both in 1964. In 1965 she played her most bizarre role, as the voice of the mother of Jerry Van Dyke reincarnated as a 1928 Porter automobile in the television series ''My Mother the Car.''
Like many former stars she turned eventually to summer stock and dinner theater, with disastrous results. In 1974 on a stage in Jacksonville, Fla., falling scenery broke her back and smashed the nerves in her legs. She finished the performance, held together with silver gaffer's tape.
Told she would probably never walk again, she refused to accept the diagnosis. Immensely athletic, she was a crack trap shooter and deep sea fisherman, and her MGM contract gave her three months off each winter to ski in Sun Valley. She never came to terms with what the accident had done to her body. But she did walk, with a cane that she used reluctantly and constantly misplaced. And, a decade after the accident, she moved out of Southern California to Ketchum, where she could see Dollar Mountain, which she used to ski, through the window of her house.
A different kind of accident brought her one more chance for glory. The producer of a television remake of ''A Letter to Three Wives'' thought it would be a great marketing ploy to get one of the original stars, Jeanne Crain or Ms. Sothern, to play a cameo role. Ms. Sothern's bit part let Lindsay Anderson, the director who would be making ''The Whales of August,'' know that Ms. Sothern was still alive.
Mr. Anderson had retained ''a memory of her charm'' from Ms. Sothern's early musicals. ''In a sense she was too good an actress to be a star,'' he said. ''Being a star requires elephantiasis of the ego.''
Ms. Sothern is survived by her daughter, Tisha Sterling, an actress and designer; a sister, Sally Adams of Boise, Idaho; and a granddaughter.
Summing up her career after ''The Whales of August,'' Ms. Sothern shook her graying gold ringlets and said, ''I've done everything but play rodeos.''
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