Veteran actress Anna Lee dead

Anna Lee, a Kent-born actress whose 70-year career in movies and television spanned from her breakthrough role in How Green Was My Valley to an extended run on General Hospital, has died of pneumonia, her son said. She was 91.

Lee had been ill for several months and died at her home near Beverly Hills with son Jeffrey Byron, 48, by her side, Byron said.

Paralysed from the waist down in a car accident just a year after she began playing Lila Quartermaine in ABC’s General Hospital, Lee acted in a wheelchair for more than two decades until she left the soap last year, Byron said.

Born Joan Boniface Winnifrith in Kent, Lee studied acting in London and was known as “the British bombshell” when touring with the London Repertory Theatre, her son said.

In the early 1930s she moved to California to work in Hollywood, and appeared in more than 60 films including The Sound of Music (1965), Fort Apache (1948) and King Solomon’s Mines (1937).

“She was beautiful,” said actress Maureen O’Hara, who starred with Lee in 1941’s How Green Was My Valley. “She went to the United States and immediately everybody fell in love with her.”

O’Hara said Lee was most effective as an actress in straightforward tales of love and family life. “She made you feel, looking at her, that you belonged to the same family as her,” she said.

In 1982, Lee received an MBE. She is to be honoured with a lifetime achievement award at Friday’s Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony.

Lee was married three times, first to Robert Stevenson, the director of films including The Love Bug and Mary Poppins. She was married to George Stafford for two decades and wed writer Robert Nathan in 1970. Nathan died in 1985.

Lee is survived by a sister, Ruth, two sons, two daughters, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held in Los Angeles in several weeks, Byron said.