American actress Eleanor Parker, nominated for three Oscars and was popular for her "Sound of Music" role, died Monday at the age of 91, her family stated.
The actress died at a medical facility near her Palm Springs California home, from complications related to pneumonia, according to director Richard Gale, who is a family friend.
Parker appeared in some 80 movies and television series. An actress of notable versatility, she was called "Woman of a Thousand Faces", the title of her biography by Doug McClelland.
Her most famous role was playing Baroness Elsa Schrader in "The Sound of Music".
By 1946, Parker had starred in Between Two Worlds, Hollywood Canteen, Pride of the Marines, Never Say Goodbye, and played the key role of Mildred Rogers in the remake of Human Bondage. She broke the champagne bottle on the nose of the California Zephyr train, to mark its inaugural journey from San Francisco on March 19, 1949.
Parker was nominated three times as Best Actress for the Academy Award. In 1950, she was nominated for Caged, in which she played a prison inmate. For this role, she won the 1950 Volpi Cup for Best Actress at the Venice Film Festival. She was then nominated for the Oscar in 1951 for her performance as Mary McLeod, the woman who doesn’t understand the position of her unstable detective husband (played by Kirk Douglas) in Detective Story and again in 1955 for her portrayal of opera singer Marjorie Lawrence in the Oscar-winning biopic Interrupted Melody. She followed Detective Story with her portrayal of an actress in love with a swashbuckling nobleman (played by Stewart Granger) in Scaramouche. Parker then starred with Charlton Heston as a 1900s mail-order bride in The Naked Jungle, directed by George Pal.