The actress Betsy Blair, who died last week, at 85, in London, where she had lived for many years, is best remembered for her performance in the female lead in Marty (1955), for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In fact, her Hollywood career had started cracking apart before she even got that role. A dancer and model when she was in her teens, Blair met Gene Kelly when he was working as a choreographer of the Billy Rose show Diamond Horseshoe and hired her for the chorus. In 1941, when she was 17, they married. That same year, she made her "straight" acting debut as the female lead in William Saroyan's The Beautiful People. She broke into movies in 1947 and had parts in such films as A Double Life and Another Part of the Forest. Unfortunately, the HUAC era of the blacklist was starting up, and Blair, who had been in a Marxist study group run by the actor Lloyd Gough, was politically vulnerable. (She later said that she had tried to join the Communist party but had been refused admission because her marriage to a relatively apolitical movie star would make her membership problematic.) The studio almost got cold feet about hiring her for Marty, but Kelly himself settled that one by telling the bosses that if she didn't get the job, he feared that he'd be too distraught to show up for work on his own big production, It's Always Fair Weather.

Despite the acclaim she won for Marty, its release signaled the end of her upward climb in Hollywood. That same year, she played Bianca in a British TV production of Othello, and most of her work for the next several years would be in overseas productions. She appeared in the 1956 French film Rencontre à Paris, the 1956 Calle Mayor, directed by Juan Antonio Bardem, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1957 Il Grido, the 1960 Irish film Lies My Father Told Me, and British TV productions of Come Back, Little Sheba, Summer and Smoke, Death of a Salesman, and The Wings of the Dove. She returned to America for the 1988 Costa-Gavras film Betrayed, as well as a guest appearance on thirtysomething and the 1994 TV miniseries Scarlett, based on Alexandra Ripley's sequel to Gone with the Wind. In 1957, she divorced Kelly, who she would describe 45 years later as "“This perfect husband, father, friend, protector, provider, hard worker," adding "I loved and admired him as a brilliant actor and dancer as well as a good, good man!" In 1963, she married the director Karel Reisz (Who'll Stop the Rain, Sweet Dreams); they would remain together until his death in 2002. The nest year, she published The Memory of All That: Love and Politics in New York, Hollywood, and Paris, a searching, honest book that was to become one of the most praised of show business memoirs. She is survived by her daughter, Kerry Kelly Novick, as well as eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.