Ann Marie Blyth is an American retired actress and singer. For her performance as Veda in the 1945 Michael Curtiz film Mildred Pierce, Blyth was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, and became the earliest living acting Academy Award nominee upon the death of Angela Lansbury in 2022.

Watch on the Rhine is a 1941 American play by Lillian Hellman. In an essay on World War II, a contributor to The Companion to Southern Literature (2002) wrote that the play's "peculiar combination of drawing-room comedy in a genteel southern home with sinister corruption of the Nazi regime in Europe made for a unique and powerful drama, one strong enough to win the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award."