Ann Savage, nee' Bernice Maxine Lyon and fated to become one of the iconic femme fatales of no-budget noir, died on Christmas Day, at a nursing home, at the age of 87. She was born in Columbia, South Carolina, to an army dad who died before she was five years old and a mother with whom she lit out for Hollywood when Bernice was all of ten. She trained at Max Reinhardt's acting school at a time when it was managed by Bert D'Armand, who she married when she was twenty-one; the marriage--her second--lasted until his death in 1969. (Her earlier marriage, when she was eighteen, last two years and ended in divorce.) She appeared in thirty movies between 1943 and 1953 but failed to make much of a dent in the public's consciousness--but then, as she herself admitted, most of the pictures she was in didn't deserve much of an audience. The big exception is Detour, the 1945 cult classic in which she co-starred with Tom Neal for director Edgar G. Ulmer. Shot in less than a week on a budget of $20,000, it would develop a reputation as one of the most febrile and unforgettable noirss ever to come out of poverty row, and Savage's Vera would take her place in the history of the genre as one of the all-time greatest mistakes ever made by a man on the road, a woman who attaches herself to Neal's doomed antihero like a virus. (It was the fourth and final movie that she made with Neal, who in 1965 would be tried for the murder of his wife and convicted of involuntary manslaughter. He died in 1972.)

In 1986, just about the time that the rediscovery of Detour (thanks to TV broadcasts and home-video releases) was reviving her name, Savage made her first film appearance since 1953, cast somewhat against type as a nun in the steamy romance Fire with Fire starring Virginia Madsen. After that, she resumed her retirement until last year, when Canadian auteur and Detour fan cajoled her into playing the mother of his on-screen alter ego in My Winnipeg. Scarcely recognizable, she gave that movie a full jolt of comic energy, but was subsequently bedrodden after suffering a series of strokes. In 1992, Detour was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress's National Film Registry.