TERESA WRIGHT was a rarity among Hollywood actresses of the 1940s, radiating demure sweetness and light in an era dominated by brash pin-ups.

Samuel Goldwyn brought her to Hollywood in 1941 for William Wyler’s version of The Little Foxes, and she immediately made her mark as a serious, sensitive performer, winning an Oscar nomination for her part as the daughter, Alexandra. The following year she played another daughter in Wyler’s Mrs Miniver, and won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Other major parts followed. In 1943 Hitchcock made canny use of her innocent demeanour in Shadow of a Doubt (she played the doting niece who gradually realises that her beloved Uncle Charlie may have murdered several susceptible widows); and with her homely looks she slotted easily into the postwar domestic tapestry of Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

But she felt increasingly choked by the demands and constraints of the Hollywood factory: “I only ever wanted to be an actress, not a star,” she recalled in a 1984 interview. From the 1950s onwards, she concentrated more on theatre work, appearing successfully on Broadway in plays by William Inge, Arthur Miller and Robert Anderson (her second husband).

Muriel Teresa Wright was born in 1918, in New York. She first trod the boards aged 10 in a high-school production at Maplewood, New Jersey. Ten years later, in 1938, she joined the Broadway cast of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, and tackled several roles on tour. But it was Life With Father (1939) that made her name; the part of the ingénue, Mary, described in the stage directions as “a refreshingly pretty small-town girl of 16”, perfectly suited her petite, girl-next-door appearance.

For a while Hollywood happily cast her in similar roles. In 1942 she married Niven Busch, the novelist and screenwriter, and appeared in several of his high-flown scripts: as Thorley Callum, a girl entrapped in a family feud in Pursued (1947) and as a young widow in the thriller The Capture (1950).

By that time, Wright’s Hollywood career had run into trouble. She had turned down several contracts because of her refusal to be photographed for publicity purposes in “leg art” poses, and in 1948 she was dismissed from the Goldwyn studios for failing to comply with their exploitation plans for their Christmas release, Enchantment. The producer Stanley Kramer found a strong role for her as the faithful fiancée of Marlon Brando’s amputee in The Men (1950), but her days as a young heroine were numbered. In George Cuckor’s The Actress (1953) she was already playing mothers, even though she was only 34.

She kept busy in regional theatre and television, earning Emmy nominations for her role as Annie Sullivan in the original production of The Miracle Worker (1957) and, two years later, for her portrayal of the photographer Margaret Bourke-White. In 1957 she returned to Broadway in Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, playing the long-suffering wife of a blustering salesman. Later productions included the 1975 Circle in the Square revival of Death of a Salesman, with George C. Scott, and several plays by Robert Anderson, whom she married in 1959 — I Never Sang for My Father (1968) and Solitaire/Double Solitaire (1971).

British theatregoers finally had a chance to appreciate her grace and sincerity in 1984, when she repeated her role from the Broadway revival of Paul Osborn’s Morning at Seven in Watford and London.

She returned to films in character parts in the late 1960s. Some roles were unfortunate: it was a pity to see her drowning (literally) in the leeches of Flood! (1976). But her reputation for choosing projects with care was restored by James Ivory’s Roseland (1977), a portrait of the New York dancehall; she almost stole the film as the chattering widow obsessed with her late husband.

She leaves two children from her marriage to Niven Busch (they were divorced in 1952). She divorced Robert Anderson in 1978.

Teresa Wright, actress, was born on October 27, 1918. She died on March 6, 2005, aged 86.