A then 23-year-old Rhonda Fleming got her first major role in Alfred Hitchcock's "Trollbunden" from 1945, where she plays one of the patients at the mental hospital where Ingrid Bergman's character is a doctor.
The breakthrough came in Jacques Tourneur's stylistic film noir "Shadows from the past" three years later.
She starred there against Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas in the first of several hard-boiled films she later appeared in, including "A Murderer Goes Loose" against Joseph Cotten and Fritz Lang's "The Fifth Victim."
- I loved playing those roles.
It was naughty women and I was such a nice girl, said Fleming, whose real name was Marilyn Louis, in an interview in 2012.
Engaged in healthcare for women
The black-and-white films contrasted with the colorful musicals and westerns she simultaneously starred in, such as "A Yankee at King Arthur's Court" and "The Sheriff of Dodge City."
When her film career ended, Fleming became involved in the fight for better healthcare for women and part-financed, among other things, a gynecological clinic in Los Angeles.
Rhonda Fleming turned 97 years old.