Ann Savage, the actress who played an evil, unredeemable femme fatale who makes life hell for Tom Neal in the 1945 B-noir Detour (see clip), died in her sleep at a nursing home on Christmas Day from complications following a series of strokes. She was 87.
Savage had a minor career in films of the 1940s, with Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour as her sole claim to fame — unless one also counts her latter-day comeback in Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, playing the director's mother, which was released last year.
Among Savage's other features are the B musical Ever Since Venus (1944); Sam Newfield's film noir Apology for Murder (1945), in which she plays another schemer; the crime thriller The Last Crooked Mile (1946), with Don 'Red' Barry and Adele Mara; and the Western Satan's Cradle (1949), opposite Duncan Renaldo as the Cisco Kid.
One bizarre story I was told about Ann Savage is that in the mid-1980s she was invited to the old Vagabond Theater near downtown Los Angeles for a q&a session following a screening of Detour. The next day, Detour was screened again and another Ann Savage showed up claiming that the previous night's Ann Savage had been an impostor. The issue, to the best of my knowledge, was left unresolved.
As an aside, the above Savage story reminds me of another story about a woman in Florida who claimed she was second-rank silent-film actress Vera Reynolds, asserting that the Vera Reynolds who died in 1962 was an impostor.
Somewhat along the same lines, silent-film superstar Corinne Griffith claimed that she was an impostor, proclaiming at a 1960s divorce court hearing that the real Corinne Griffith had died and that she — Griffith's much younger sister — had taken her place. Someone should make a movie about that. In any case, impostor or no, Griffith died a very wealthy woman in 1979.
This makes me think of a fun and little seen film called "Why Do Fools Fall in Love," which was about 50's singer Frankie Lymon and 3 women who claimed to be his widow.