NEW YORK -- Celeste Holm, a versatile, bright-eyed blonde who soared to Broadway fame in Oklahoma! and won an Oscar in Gentleman's Agreement, but whose last years were filled with financial difficulty and estrangement from her sons, died Sunday, a relative said. She was 95.
Holm had been hospitalized about two weeks ago with dehydration. She asked her husband on Friday to bring her home and spent her final days with her husband, Frank Basile, and other relatives and close friends by her side, said Amy Phillips, a great-niece of Holm's who answered the phone at Holm's apartment on Sunday.
Holm died around 3:30 a.m. at her long-time apartment on Central Park West, located in the same building where Robert De Niro lives and where a fire broke out last month, Phillips said.
"I think she wanted to be here, in her home, among her things, with people who loved her," she said.
In a career that spanned more than half a century, Holm played everyone from Ado Annie - the girl who just can't say no in Oklahoma! - to a worldly theatrical agent in the 1991 comedy I Hate Hamlet to guest-star turns on TV shows such as Fantasy Island and Love Boat II to Bette Davis's best friend in All About Eve.
She won the Academy Award in 1947 for best supporting actress for her performance in Gentlemen's Agreement and received Oscar nominations for Come to the Stable (1949) and All About Eve (1950).
Holm was also known for her untiring charity work - at one time she served on nine boards - and was a board member emeritus of the National Mental Health Association.
But late in her life she was in a bitter, multiyear legal family battle that pitted her two sons against her and her fifth husband: former waiter Basile, whom she married in 2004 and was more than 45 years her junior. The court fight over investments and inheritance wiped away much of her savings and left her dependent on social security. The actress and her sons no longer spoke, and she was sued for overdue maintenance and legal fees on her Manhattan apartment.
The future Broadway star was born in New York on April 29, 1917, the daughter of Norwegian-born Theodore Holm, who worked for the American branch of Lloyd's of London, and Jean Parke Holm, a painter and writer.
Her first Broadway success came in 1939 in the cast of William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life. But it was her creation of the role of man-crazy Ado Annie Carnes in the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! in 1943 that really impressed the critics.
Holm was hired by La Vie Parisienne, and later by the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel to sing to their late-night supper-club audiences after the Oklahoma! curtain fell.
The slender, blue-eyed blonde moved west to pursue a film career. "Oscar Hammerstein told me, 'You won't like it,'" and he was right, she said. Hollywood "was just too artificial. The values are entirely different. That balmy climate is so deceptive." She returned to New York after several years.
In the 1990s, Holm and Gerald McRainey starred in CBS's Promised Land, a spinoff of Touched by an Angel. In 1995, she joined such stars as Tony Randall and Jerry Stiller to lobby for state funding for the arts in Albany, N.Y. Her last big-screen role was as Brendan Fraser's grandmother in the romance Still Breathing.
Holm was married five times. She leaves two sons and three grandchildren. Her marriage in 1938 to director Ralph Nelson lasted a year but produced a son, Theodor Holm Nelson. In 1940, she married Francis Davies, an English auditor. In 1946, she married airline public-relations executive A. Schuyler Dunning and they had a son, Daniel Dunning.
During her fourth marriage, to actor Robert Wesley Addy, whom she married in 1966, the two appeared together on stage when they could. In the mid-1960s, when neither had a project going, they put together a two person show called Interplay - An Evening of Theater-in-Concert that toured the United States and was sent abroad by the State Department. Addy died in 1996.
Funeral arrangements for Holm haven't been made. The family is asking that any memorial donations be made to UNICEF, Arts Horizons or to The Lillian Booth Actors Home of The Actors Fund in Englewood, N.J.
