Evelyn Keyes, 91; Actress Starred in Dozens of Films

Her greatest opportunity to score with audiences was in "The Jolson Story" (1946), a big-budget production with Larry Parks as the legendary entertainer and Ms. Keyes playing a renamed version of Jolson's wife, actress Ruby Keeler.

She said studio head Harry Cohn cast her in "The Jolson Story" in hopes that she would finally relent and sleep with him. When she did not, he refused to lend her to another studio for a plum role.

Several mediocre roles later, she fled in frustration to South America and Europe, taking up with a jai alai sports star along the way.

She played Tom Ewell's wife in "The Seven Year Itch" (1955) and, winding down her career, had a cameo in "Around the World in Eighty Days" (1956), a production of then-companion Mike Todd. He soon left her for Elizabeth Taylor.

Ms. Keyes was an advocate of psychoanalysis and said she had a fascination with father figures. Most of her affairs and marriages were with much older men. Her first husband, alcoholic businessman Barton Bainbridge, killed himself in 1940. She then married Charles Vidor, who had directed her in several films.

After divorcing Vidor in 1945, she married Huston, a difficult man who once brought home a Mexican orphan while filming "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948) and announced that he would be their son. Ms. Keyes, who never wanted children, was not amused, and the boy left.

She later reprimanded Huston for purchasing a chimpanzee.

"One of us has to go. It's the monkey or me," she said.

"Honey," he said, "it's you."

In 1957, she became the eighth wife of bandleader Shaw, and they spent many years in Spain and Connecticut. Though long separated, they remained married until 1985.

Ms. Keyes settled in Los Angeles in the 1970s, wrote a chatty column for the Los Angeles Times ("Keyes to the Town") and spun out three books, a semi-autobiographical novel and two autobiographies. One of the memoirs, "Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister" (1977), a title her published urged, was a bestseller.

Largely self-educated, Ms. Keyes amassed pre-Columbian art from her divorce from Huston and became fluent in French and Spanish. She left no immediate survivors, and that seemed to suit her.

"God knows, I've never been homesick one day since I left Atlanta," she told the New York Times in 1977. "I have no roots. I deliberately set out to destroy them, and I did. If there's any such thing as a hometown for me, it's Hollywood. I was formed here as an adult."