Holm was the only child of Theodor Holm, an insurance adjuster for Lloyd’s of London, and Jean Parke Holm, an artist. She grew up in Manhattan, around Gramercy Park, and spent summers at the family farm in Hackettstown, N.J.

Interested in acting since childhood, she studied at the University of Chicago and began working in summer stock and community theater in the 1930s.

Celeste Holm, made an indelible Broadway impression as an amorous country girl in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, earned an Academy Award as the knowing voice of tolerance in “Gentleman’s Agreement” and went on to a six-decade screen and stage career, frequently cast as the wistful or brittle sophisticate.

Ms. Holm was 25 and had already appeared in at a number of Broadway productions, including William Saroyan’s Time of Your Life, when she was cast as Ado Annie in Oklahoma!, the period musical that reinvented the form. Her character’s shining moment was the twangy lament “I Cain’t Say No,” about Annie’s inability to resist men’s romantic advances. The role made her a star, and she played the lead in the musical comedy Bloomer Girl the next year.

Her film career also flourished. She played a fellow psychiatric patient of Olivia de Havilland’s character in “The Snake Pit” (1948). She earned two additional Oscar nominations, for portraying a French nun in “Come to the Stable” (1949) and a playwright’s well-meaning wife in “All About Eve” (1950).
If her best-known roles shared one quality, aside from Ms. Holm’s signature sparkle, it was that her characters rarely got the guy.

Source: The New York Times