Her spunk and tenacity were never displayed more appealingly than here, and she was again nominated for a supporting-actress Oscar.Returning to Goldwyn, she was given her first starring role, in Sam Wood’s Pride of the Yankees (1942), the screen biography of one of the greatest baseball players, Lou Gehrig, first baseman of the New York Yankees, who died at the age of 37 from a form of motor neurone disease now known by his name. Variety reported, Miss Wright is a newcomer to the screen, and is magnificent in a very difficult part. He later recalled that, when he went to see her backstage, Miss Wright was seated at her dressing table, and looked for all the world like a little girl experimenting with her mother’s cosmetics. I had discovered in her from the first sight, you might say, an unaffected genuineness and appeal.He offered her a contract the same night, and immediately cast her as Alexandra, the daughter of the ruthless, grasping Regina Giddens, in the screen version of Lillian Hellman’s study of greed in the South The Little Foxes (1941). The final confrontation between mother and daughter, when Alexandra rejects Regina’s offer of conciliation and accuses her of murdering her father, displayed Wright’s ability to reveal the moral strength latent in her character’s ingenuousness.Superbly directed by William Wyler, with a brilliant central performance by Bette Davis and sterling support from many of the original cast, including Patricia Collinge, Dan Duryea and Charles Dingle, The Little Foxes won critical acclaim, with Wright getting a major share of attention.

A teacher helped her get a scholarship to the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she was an apprentice for two summers.After graduating from Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, in 1938, she moved to New York, adopting the name Teresa Wright as there was already a Muriel Wright registered with Equity. In the autumn of 1938 she was given work on Broadway playing a small role and understudying Dorothy McGuire (who had succeeded Martha Scott) in the role of Emily in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Wright had been playing in the show for almost a year when Sam Goldwyn went to see it. She did not get a chance to play Emily in New York, but played the part on tour in New England in the spring of 1939.A spell in summer stock preceded her creating the role of Mary, the ing?e in Life with Father (1939), the comedy by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse which holds the record as the longest-running straight play in American theatre history. After going on a trip to New York to see Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, she took an interest in acting and played leading roles in school plays. She was then raised by family in New York and New Jersey, and did not attend school until she was eight years old. When the producer Sam Goldwyn signed her to a contract, she insisted on a famous clause stipulating that she would not have to “pose for photographers in a bathing suit”.

She also avoided fan-magazine interviews and vetoed studio-concocted romances. She was given roles in prestigious productions guided by top directors, but her dislike of publicity, and time off for pregnancies, alienated Goldwyn, who terminated her contract, after which her screen image lost some of its lustre. She won Oscar nominations for her first three films, a record still unequalled, and five of her first six movies, including The Little Foxes, Shadow of a Doubt and The Best Years of Our Lives, are acknowledged classics.However, she was to find herself both the beneficiary and the victim of the studio and contract system of the time. Her later career was primarily on television and in the theatre, where she continued to win acclaim for her truthful and compassionate performances.Born Muriel Teresa Wright in 1918 in New York City, she was the only child of an insurance agent and his wife, who separated soon after her birth.