She was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident and used a wheelchair for more than twenty years.
She was the goddaughter of Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
During World War II, Lee performed on USO tours with Jack Benny and others, entertaining troops in North Africa and Europe. General George S. Patton gave her a special medal for her efforts.
She died just one week before she was to receive a Daytime Emmy Award for lifetime achievement. Her actor son Jeffrey Byron accepted the award on her behalf at the ceremony in New York.
She was a close friend of Maureen O'Hara and Roddy McDowall.
For Bedlam (1946), Anna darkened her hair so that audiences would take her more seriously and kept it dark for much of the following few years. One of her costumes was worn by Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939).
She did no film work between 1949 and 1958 because, by her account, she had been blacklisted by far-right supporters of Senator McCarthy. She found this absurd, especially since she described herself as "an old-fashioned Winston Churchill conservative," and she always praised her old friend John Ford for breaking the blacklist. She appeared in eight of Ford's films.
Amber Tamblyn first played the adopted granddaughter of Lee's character on General Hospital (1963). In the 1950s (long before Tamblyn was born), Tamblyn's father, Russ Tamblyn, was married to Lee's daughter Venetia Stevenson.
Anna Lee died on May 14, 2004. Only a few months later, General Hospital (1963) paid tribute to Lee by holding a memorial service for her character.
Comedian Jack Hulbert served as best man at her first wedding, and Alfred Hitchcock gave her away at her second.
One of three children of an Anglican clergyman at St. Peters Church in Ightham, Kent, her godmother was the legendary actress Sybil Thorndike.
She had two daughters with her first husband, Robert Stevenson. After their divorce in 1944, Anna was granted custody of her younger daughter, Caroline, but Venetia chose to live with her father. Anna had been separated from her daughter for 15 years. They were reunited after appearing together in Jet Over the Atlantic (1959) and The Big Night (1960).
From 1990 to 1991, Mrs. Lee's granddaughter Erin Everly was married to Axl Rose of Guns N' Roses, briefly making Axl Rose Mrs. Lee's "grandson-in-law." Mrs. Everly was the inspiration for Guns N' Roses' song "Sweet Child O' Mine" and was the daughter of Mrs. Lee's daughter Venetia Stevenson and Don Everly of The Everly Brothers.
She appeared in two Oscar Best Picture winners: How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Sound of Music (1965), and in one more nominee: Mutiny on the Bounty (1962).
During World War II, she volunteered for overseas duty with the USO, entertaining Allied troops in North Africa, Iran and Sicily.
Anna Lee appeared in King Solomon's Mines (1937) alongside a character named Allan Quartermain, then 46 years later played a character named Lila Quartermaine, who had a son named Alan Quartermaine, on the soap opera General Hospital (1963).
She was the mother of actress Venetia Stevenson, Jeffrey Byron and Steve Stafford.
A blue-eyed blonde, she occasionally went brunette in films. In Seven Sinners (1940), she wore her hair darker because star Marlene Dietrich insisted there be no rival blondes in her photographs.
Her friends: Jeanne Cooper, Ruth Warrick, Maureen O'Hara, George Gaynes, John Loder, John Ingle, John Berradino, John Ford, John Wayne, Rachel Ames, Stuart Damon, Ken Curtis, Constance Towers, Loretta Young, Claude Rains, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Robert Nathan, Robert Conrad, Boris Karloff, Roddy McDowall, Walter Brennan, Richard Haydn, Donald Crisp and Patric Knowles.
She is best remembered by the public for her role as Lila Quartermaine on the soap opera General Hospital (1963).
She appeared in two films selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry as "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Sound of Music (1965).
She initially studied with Elsie Fogarty at the Royal Albert Central School Hall in London. She later toured with the London Repertory Theatre, where she earned the title "The British Bombshell."
She had three sons from her second marriage: John Stafford, Steven Stafford and Timothy Stafford. John Stafford died in 1986.
On January 7, 1993, she was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6777 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.
For her services to drama, she was appointed MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1982 Queen's Birthday Honours.
She dubbed the voice of Patricia Morison, who played the writer George Sand in Song Without End (1960), because George Cukor, one of the directors who took over the film after Charles Vidor's death, wanted the character to have a harsher vocal tone.
She was a mentor and friend to Leslie Charleson, Anthony Geary and Jacklyn Zeman.
She was close friends with Jeanne Cooper. Cooper received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame seven months after Lee.
The progressive metal band Dream Theater named a character in one of their songs after her.
After her death, she was buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
A political conservative.
Her brother, Sir John Winnifrith, served in the British government as a minister responsible for Agriculture and Fisheries and was also the director-general of the National Trust. He died on 1 January 1993 at the age of 84.
18 January 1988: The 4th annual Soap Opera Digest Awards were broadcast, and there she won the Outstanding Supporting Actress - Daytime award for her role as Lila Quartermaine on "General Hospital." Her category was presented by her co-stars Ian Buchanan and Finola Hughes.
21 May 2004: After Anna Lee's death, the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences was accepted on her behalf by her son, Jeffrey Byron, at the 31st Annual Daytime Emmy Awards. Ms. Lee's former "General Hospital" co-star Vanessa Marcil hosted the ceremony and paid tribute to Ms. Lee before Mr. Byron's introduction and speech.
Grandmother of Erin Everly and Evan Stafford.
Former General Hospital (1963) co-star Jacklyn Zeman did not live far from Lee's close friend Jeanne Cooper.
30 May 2007: Her memoir "Anna Lee: Memoir of a Career on General Hospital and in Film," written and completed with Barbara Roisman Cooper, was published posthumously by McFarland.