Audrey Totter: Star of 1940s film noir and 'B' films who portrayed the genres' classic dangerous women to brittle perfection

Totter in her best-known role, Miss Fromsett in 'Lady In The Lake (REx)

One of the many pleasures afforded by the Hollywood film noir of the 1940s was their glorious array of conscienceless females who, with their aggressively padded shoulders, sharp enamelled fingernails and pursed, glossy lips, lured countless poor dumb slobs to their doom. One of the most cherishable of these harpies has to be Adrienne Fromsett in Lady in the Lake (1946), played to brittle perfection by Audrey Totter.

The character of Miss Fromsett was built up from Raymond Chandler's novel and converted from assistant to the head of a perfume company to a publisher of gory pulp novels ("there's not enough blood – take it out and put more blood in!"). At first starchy and pretentious, and the butt of a relentless stream of misogynistic put-downs from Robert Montgomery's ever-present but rarely seen Philip Marlowe, Miss Fromsett was such a thrilling little minx she just had to be guilty of something, and it always comes as a decided letdown when she not only proves to have been on the level but actually gets to join Marlowe for the final clinch. (In fact this scene was only added at the last minute after preview audiences protested at the absence of a fade-out kiss.)

The offbeat use of a subjective camera standing in for the detective for most of the film's length was plainly going to place a formidable task upon the film's leading lady, who would have to go against one of the film actor's most basic taboos by playing directly to the camera throughout (including another kissing scene). Director/star Robert Montgomery chose the relatively unknown Totter after seeing her playing an uncredited bit as a perfume saleslady in The Hidden Eye (1945) and "because she has played a lot of radio and is accustomed to acting with an inanimate object, a microphone."

The eldest of five siblings, she was a natural mimic from childhood, starting with her Viennese father and Swedish grandparents. Upon graduation she headed for Chicago, landing the lead in a stage production of The Copperhead in 1938, which led to radio work in Chicago plus a tour in the role of the streetwalker in My Sister Eileen. This brought her to New York, where more radio work followed, earning her the tag the "girl with a thousand voices."

With her slinky eye and pouting lips, she had an expressive face to go with her voice, and in 1944 was she signed by MGM, making her debut in Main Street After Dark (1944) as the daughter of a family of pickpockets. She then achieved a considerable impact in a film in which neither she nor her name appeared on the screen, as the voice of schizophrenic Phyllis Thaxter's depraved alter ego in Arch Oboler's Bewitched (1945), one of a spate of fanciful "psychological" dramas that were then the rage in Hollywood. Her role anticipated by nearly 30 years Mercedes McCambridge's demon in The Exorcist, and her voice was heard again as a telephone operator during the "Number Please" sketch in Ziegfeld Follies (1945).

Her first prominent role in an "A" feature was in The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), as a waitress with whom John Garfield enjoys a brief fling. MGM didn't seem to know what to do with her after Lady in the Lake, which hadn't been the hoped-for hit, and her best parts were usually on loan to other studios. These included the grasping niece of genially murderous Claude Rains in Michael Curtiz's The Unsuspected (1947), for Warner Bros ("you were always my favourite," he purrs, just before shooting her, "so charmingly unscrupulous, but so greedy"); a waterfront floozie recruited by the Devil (Ray Milland) to tempt honest politician Thomas Mitchell in Alias Nick Beal (1949) for Paramount; and a sympathetic role as Robert Ryan's loving wife at the end of her tether in Robert Wise's classic boxing drama The Set-Up (1949) for RKO. Back at MGM she was a secretary in The Beginning or the End (1947), a psychologist in High Wall (1947), Alexis Smith's parasitic sister with her eye on Clark Gable in Any Number Can Play (1949) and a glossy blonde trapped in a miserable marriage to Richard Basehart in Tension (1949).

She "finally realised that MGM never had any real plans for me", the final straw coming when they wouldn't loan her to Paramount for A Place in the Sun. Seeing out her contract playing a roadhouse chanteuse in The Sellout (1951), she then made two USO tours for the troops in Korea and signed a two-year deal with Columbia in January 1952 based on Harry Cohn's assurance that she'd be in From Here to Eternity. Instead she was lumbered with Bs, a rare bright spot being her butch female gunslinger in leather jeans in Alan Dwan's outrageous The Woman They Almost Lynched (1953).

Apart from A Bullet for Joey (1955), which at least saw her in the company of George Raft and Edward G Robinson, her films became cheaper and tattier. Jet Attack (1958), in which she played a Russian nurse, made it into the book The 50 Worst Movies of All Time. "It didn't matter," she recalled. "I met my future husband, Dr Leo Fred [chief of staff at the Los Angeles Veteran's Hospital] in January of 1952 as well." She gave up her affiliation with Christian Science to marry, and became a mother (in the 1970s Ava Gardner told her, "I envy you Audrey. You've got what I always wanted – a happy marriage and a child")

During 1951-54 she starred in the radio series Meet Millie, and later guested on TV (Wagon Train, Perry Mason, Dr Kildare, Bonanza, Hawaii Five-O etc), as well as appearing as a regular in Cimarron City and Our Man Higgins. In 1972 she returned to the MGM lot to play the super-efficient Nurse Wilcox in the TV soap Medical Center, and continued to make occasional TV appearances during the 1980s, including a nun in Murder She Wrote. Her final big screen appearance was in Disney's The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again (1979).

"For years nobody bothered with me – didn't know who I was, didn't care," she said. "Now I'm recognised on the street. It's an amazing turn of events... I've always been fond of Lady in the Lake, Alias Nick Beal, The Set-Up and Tension. They were I suppose, B movies when the studios put all their energy into the costume pictures, the big musicals. Now it turns out that people look at these Bs far more than the big musicals. There's a whole cult around them... Who knew these movies would be so popular 50 years later?"

Audrey Totter, actress: born Joliet, Illinois 20 December 20 1917; married 1952 Dr Leo Fred (died 1996; one child); died 13 December 2013.