Debbie Reynolds, the wholesome ingénue in 1950s films like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Tammy and the Bachelor,” died Wednesday, a day after the death of her daughter, the actress Carrie Fisher. She was 84.

Her death was confirmed by her son, Todd Fisher, according to her agent, Tom Markley of the Metropolitan Talent Agency. Ms. Reynolds was taken to a Los Angeles hospital on Wednesday afternoon. Mr. Fisher told the television station ABC 7 Los Angeles that she had suffered a stroke.

On Tuesday, Ms. Reynolds had expressed gratitude to her daughter’s fans on Facebook.

“Thank you to everyone who has embraced the gifts and talents of my beloved and amazing daughter,” she wrote. “I am grateful for your thoughts and prayers that are now guiding her to her next stop.”

Ms. Reynolds’s career peak may have been her best-actress Academy Award nomination for playing the title role in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” (1964), a rags-to-riches western musical based on a true story.

Her best-remembered film is probably “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), the classic MGM musical about 1920s moviemaking, in which she held her own with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor, although she was only 19 when the movie was shot and had never danced professionally before. Her fans may cherish her sentimental good-girl portrayals, like the title role in “Tammy and the Bachelor” (1957), in which she played a Louisiana moonshiner’s wide-eyed granddaughter who spouted folksy wisdom.

Her greatest fame, however, may have come not from any movie role but from the Hollywood scandal involving her husband and a glamorous young widow.

In 1955, Ms. Reynolds married Eddie Fisher, the boyish music idol whose hits included “Oh! My Pa-Pa” and “I’m Walking Behind You,” and the young couple were embraced by fan magazines as America’s sweethearts. Their best friends were the producer Mike Todd and his new wife, the femme-fatale film star Elizabeth Taylor.

When Mr. Todd died in a private-plane crash in 1958, Ms. Reynolds and Mr. Fisher rushed to comfort Ms. Taylor. Mr. Fisher’s comforting, however, turned into a very public extramarital affair. He and Ms. Reynolds were divorced early the next year, and he and Ms. Taylor were married weeks later. That marriage lasted five years. Ms. Taylor left Mr. Fisher for Richard Burton, whom she had met in Rome on the set of “Cleopatra” (1963).

Almost 40 years later, in an interview with The Chicago Sun-Times, Ms. Reynolds said of Ms. Taylor, “Probably she did me a great favor.” In her 1988 autobiography, “Debbie: My Life,” she described a marriage that was unhappy from the beginning.

“He didn’t think I was funny,” Ms. Reynolds wrote of Mr. Fisher. “I wasn’t good in bed. I didn’t make good gefilte fish or good chopped liver. So what did he have? A cute little girl next door with a little turned-up nose. That was, in fact, all he actually ever said he wanted from me. The children, he said, better have your nose.”

Mary Frances Reynolds was born on April 1, 1932, in El Paso. Her father, Ray, worked for the railroad and struggled financially during the Depression. Her mother, Maxene, took in laundry to help make ends meet. As Nazarene Baptists, they considered movies sinful.

With the promise of a better job, Ray moved to California when Mary Frances was 7, and the family soon followed. Her career dream was to go to college and become a gym teacher, she often said, but when she was named Miss Burbank 1948, everything changed. Two of the judges were movie-studio scouts, and she was soon under contract to Warner Bros., which changed her name.

In 1950, she made her movie debut in “The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady,” a musical comedy starring June Haver and Gordon MacRae. The same year, she played Helen Kane, the 1920s singer known as the boop-boop-a-doop girl, in “Three Little Words” and also appeared in “Two Weeks With Love,” in which she sang “Aba Daba Honeymoon” with Carleton Carpenter. The song became a huge novelty hit.

Her roles seemed to mirror 1950s attitudes toward love, marriage and family. In 1955, she played a marriage-minded all-American girl opposite Frank Sinatra in “The Tender Trap.” In 1956, she starred with her new husband, Mr. Fisher, in “Bundle of Joy,” a musical remake of the 1939 comedy “Bachelor Mother.”

“Drama’s unhappy, and playing someone unhappy would make me unhappy,” she told The Boston Globe in 1990. “Ain’t for me, honey.”

She took a stab at series television with a sitcom, “The Debbie Reynolds Show” (1969), in which she played a wacky Lucy Ricardo-like wife who wanted to be a journalist like her husband. It lasted only one season. But she soon achieved a kind of immortality as the voice of Charlotte the selfless spider in the animated film version of E. B. White’s children’s classic “Charlotte’s Web” (1973).

A decade or so later, it looked as if Ms. Reynolds would finally find a permanent home for her Hollywood memorabilia museum, this time in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., the home of Dolly Parton’s theme park, Dollywood. But that, too, fell through, and in 2011, a large portion of her collection was auctioned at the Paley Center in Beverly Hills.

Two sales, the first in June and the second in December, took in a little more than $25 million, including $4.6 million for the dress Marilyn Monroe wore in the famous subway-grate scene in “The Seven Year Itch.”

Ms. Reynolds’s career took something of a back seat to her personal life when she married Mr. Hamlett in 1984, but they divorced 12 years later.

In 1996, Ms. Reynolds made an attention-getting big-screen comeback when Albert Brooks cast her as his often-clueless yet admirably self-possessed widowed mother in “Mother.” Her uncharacteristically low-key comic performance earned her a Golden Globe nomination, though not the Oscar nomination that many had predicted.

Source : The New York Times