
Died at 119
female
Rose Joan Blondell (August 30, 1906 – December 25, 1979) was an American actress. After winning a beauty pageant, Blondell embarked upon a film career. Establishing herself as a sexy wisecracking blonde, she was a pre-Code staple of Warner Brothers and appeared in more than 100 movies and television productions. She was most active in films during the 1930s, and during this time she co-starred with Glenda Farrell in nine films, in which the duo portrayed gold-diggers. Blondell continued acting for the rest of her life, often in small character roles or supporting television roles. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in The Blue Veil (1951). Blondell was seen in featured roles in two films, Grease (1978) and the remake of The Champ (1979), released shortly before her death from leukemia.

Joan Blondell

Frau Schmidt
for Frau Schmidt in The Sound of Music (1975)
Suggested by teeyutes

In 1930s Austria, a young woman named Maria is failing miserably in her attempts to become a nun. When Navy Captain Georg Von Trapp writes to the abbey asking for a governess that can handle his seven mischievous children, Maria is given the job. His wife is dead, he is often away, and he runs the household as strictly as he did the ships on which he sailed in his glory days. The children are unhappy and resentful of the governesses their father keeps hiring and have managed to run each of them off one by one. When Maria arrives, she is initially met with the same hostility, but her kindness, understanding, and sense of fun soon draws the children to her and brings some much-needed joy into all their lives, and eventually, even the Captain is touched by her. Eventually he and Maria find themselves falling in love, even though he is already engaged to a Baroness named Elsa and Maria is still a postulant. The romance makes them both start questioning the decisions they have made. However, their personal conflicts soon become overshadowed by current events. Austria is about to be seized by Nazi Germany, and the Captain may soon find himself drafted into the German Navy and forced to fight against his own country. —Paraphrased from LOTUS73 on IMDb