Nina Foch played Gene Kelly’s benefactor and Leslie Caron’s romantic rival in An American in Paris (1951), she pulled the infant Moses from the bullrushes in The Ten Commandments (1956), and she was a skilled and manipulative player on the political scene in Spartacus (1960).

Many critics, however, now regard the films noirs Foch made during a seven-year stint at Columbia Pictures as her finest achievements, and a recent UCLA retrospective, Cool Drinks of Water: Columbia’s Noir Girls of the 40s and 50s, was built around her.

Her thrillers, including My Name is Julia Ross (1945) and The Dark Past (1948), are less wellknown than An American in Paris or Spartacus but they are admired now for their dark ambience and the way in which Foch comes across as seductive, sensual and dangerous. Foch had little time for academic theorising and dismissed them as “crappy B-movies”.

“The movies were called noir because no one had the time to light anything,” she said in an interview to mark the UCLA events. “It’s extraordinary how fast we made them. You’d shoot an entire picture in 10 or 12 days. We worked six days a week.”

She did not get on with the studio boss Harry Cohn, and he did not like her. She was desperate to leave Columbia and would have liked to be a director. She was assistant director on The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), but it was tough for women behind the cameras at the time and she fell out with a lot of people. In the 1960s she continued acting, appearing in many of the top television series of the time.

Born Nina Consuelo Maud Fock in 1924, in Leiden in Netherlands, she was the daughter of the Dutch composer Dirk Fock and the US showgirl Consuelo Flowerton. Her parents split up when she was young, and she grew up with her mother in New York. She attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

When she entered the film business she changed her name from Fock to Foch. The reason is fairly obvious, though perhaps it is a little surprising that she did not go further. Columbia cast her in The Return of the Vampire (1944) and Cry of the Werewolf (1944). She also had a big role in Charles Vidor’s Chopin biopic A Song to Remember (1945).

But arguably it is her films noirs that have best survived the test of time. In My Name is Julia Ross she plays a woman who wakes up to be told that she is someone completely different. In The Dark Past she is the tough but sympathetic gangster’s moll. In Johnny O’Clock (1947) she is a corrupt cop’s girlfriend and ends up poisoned.

Glitzier parts followed after she left Columbia, including the large role of the society widow Milo Roberts in the classic Gershwin-Minnelli-Kelly musical An American in Paris and Bithia, the Pharaoh’s daughter, in The Ten Commandments. In between she was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as the secretary in the eye of the boardroom storm in Executive Suite (1954).

Her later televison appearances included The Outer Limits (1963), Dr Kildare (1965), Bonanza (1967), Hawaii Five-O (1973), Lou Grant (1979) — a guest appearance that brought her an Emmy nomination — and LA Law (1990).

She taught film at the University of Southern California, and was particularly noted for her classes teaching directors how to work with actors. Her students included John McTiernan (Die Hard) and Ed Zwick (Traffic). She regarded teaching as more rewarding than acting. Married and divorced three times, she is survived by a son.

Nina Foch, actress, was born on April 20, 1924. She died on December 5, 2008, aged 84