Oklahoma!

Credit: Everett

Oscar Winner Celeste Holm Dies

Originally posted 07/15/2012 12:10PM

Academy Award winner Celeste Holm, who was the original girl who couldn't say no in Broadway's landmark musical Oklahoma! before she carved out a serious film career in the late '40s and '50s, has died, according to New York news station NY1. She was 95 and had been suffering heart and other ailments, say recent reports.

A New York City native of Norwegian descent, she had studied drama at the University of Chicago before landing a series of Broadway roles, starting in a short-lived 1938 comedy called Gloriana. But it was her Ado Annie, the good-natured girl of easy virtue in Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1943 tribute to the farmer and the cowboy, that made her a star and led to a contract with 20th Century Fox.