Eleanor Parker in 1955 Photo: IC

Eleanor Parker, a Hollywood leading lady of the 1940s and 1950s and three-time Oscar nominee who starred alongside big names including Frank Sinatra and Kirk Douglas and later appeared as the baroness in the blockbuster The Sound of Music, has died. She was 91.

Parker, whose ability to tackle many kinds of roles including heavy drama and light comedy­ earned her the nickname the "woman of a thousand faces," died of complications from pneumonia at a medical facility near her home in Palm Springs, California on Monday, said family friend Richard Gale.

The radiant redhead from Ohio never won an Academy Award, but was nominated for Best Actress three times within a five-year period.

Those nominations came for playing a horrified prison inmate in Caged, the neglected wife of a cop portrayed by Douglas in director William Wyler's Detective Story, and as polio-stricken opera singer Marjorie Lawrence in Interrupted Melody with Glenn Ford.

Reuters