O'Donnell was born Ann Steely in Siluria, Alabama. Her father, Grady Steely, was a school teacher who also owned a local movie theater. At age 7, her family moved to Greensboro, Alabama. At age 12 they moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where she attended Harding Junior High School and Classen High School. She also worked in a U.S. Army induction center as a stenographer. She left that job to study acting at Oklahoma City University, after watching the film Wuthering Heights, and saved money for a two-week trip to Hollywood, where she hoped to begin a movie career. She told a Boston Globe reporter in 1946 that she first became interested in acting after seeing Janet Gaynor in A Star Is Born at age 14, and that she played Juliet in a college production of Romeo and Juliet. During her brief trip to Hollywood, she was spotted at a drugstore by a man who turned out to be the agent of Samuel Goldwyn. Although a screen test indicated a thick southern accent, Goldwyn was impressed with her appearance and put her under contract. He sent her for acting and diction lessons, and had her cast in local plays, including a Pasadena Playhouse dramatization of Little Women. She later changed her name to Cathy, which was the name of the female protagonist in Wuthering Heights. She then changed her last name to O'Donnell because it was recommended by Goldwyn's wife, who claimed that audiences loved actors and actresses with Irish last names.
Career
O'Donnell appeared on stage in Boston in Life with Father in 1944, and made her film début in an uncredited role as an extra in Wonder Man. O'Donnell's first major film role was in 1946's highly acclaimed The Best Years of Our Lives, playing Wilma Cameron, the high-school sweetheart of Navy veteran Homer Parrish. Homer was played by real-life World War II veteran and double amputee Harold Russell. O'Donnell was loaned to RKO for They Live by Night, one of her more memorable films. Farley Granger played her love interest. The film is widely considered a classic of the noir genre, and is on The Guardian list of the top 10 noir films. The two actors were later re-teamed for Side Street. Later O'Donnell starred in The Miniver Story, as Judy Miniver and had a supporting role in Detective Story. She appeared as Barbara Waggoman, the love interest of James Stewart's character in the westernThe Man from Laramie. Her final film role, and perhaps her most famous part, was in Ben-Hur. She played the part of Tirzah, the sister to Judah Ben-Hur. In the 1960s, she appeared in TV shows, appearing on shows such as Perry Mason, The Rebel and Man Without a Gun. Her last screen appearance was in 1964 in an episode of Bonanza.
Then 24-year-old O'Donnell married 47-year-old Robert Wyler, the elder brother of film director William Wyler, on April 11, 1948. She had met her husband two years earlier while being directed by his brother in The Best Years of Our Lives. He also directed her in Detective Story and Ben-Hur. She died on her 22nd wedding anniversary, April 11, 1970, of a cancer-related cerebral hemorrhage following a long illness. Her husband died nine months later. The couple had no children. She is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.
