When Lee Remick came upon the movie scene in the late 1950s, there was an engaging freshness about her looks, her personality and her talent. While she could play a minx or a slattern as well as a lady, one always had the feeling that underneath her characterizations was a woman of breeding, intelligence and, above all, clear-eyed sanity.

She was born Lee Ann Remick in Quincy, Mass., in 1935, the daughter of a department-store owner. After studying acting at Bernard College and the Actors Studio, she made her Broadway debut in 1953 in Be Your Age. Her film debut came as the baton-twirling cutie who catches the eye of Andy Griffith's Lonesome Rhodes in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957).

After attention-getting roles in The Long, Hot Summer (1958) and These Thousand Hills (1959), Remick got her big break in movies when Lana Turner dropped out of Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and she inherited the role of a flirtatious wife who may or may not have been raped by the murder victim. She ran with the role and held her own in a cast that included such stalwarts as James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, George C. Scott and Eve Arden.

Remick consolidated her star status with vibrant performances in Kazan's Wild River (1960), a film version of William Faulkner's Sanctuary (1961) and the thriller Experiment in Terror (1962), in which she plays a bank teller terrorized by an extortionist. She's quite heartbreaking in her Oscar®-nominated performance in Days of Wine and Roses (1962) in which she and Jack Lemmon play an alcoholic couple -- and she's the one who can't be rehabilitated.

Throughout the 1960s and '70s, Remick created a gallery of compelling characters, both in film and television. Her theatrical features included The Running Man (1963), The Wheeler Dealers (1963), Loot (1970), Hennessy (1975) and Telefon (1977). She was especially memorable in Robert Mulligan's Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965) as the melancholy wife of a hard-knocks country singer (Steve McQueen).

After The Competition (1980) Remick turned her attention almost exclusively to television, where she had many challenging roles (including those in musical productions) and was routinely nominated for Emmy awards. She also had distinguished herself on Broadway in such vehicles as the Stephen Sondheim musical Anyone Can Whistle (1964) and the thriller Wait Until Dark (1966), which brought her a Tony award nomination.

Remick, who was twice married and had two children, succumbed to cancer in 1991.

by Roger Fristoe