Ann Savage (born Berniece Maxine Lyon, February 19, 1921 – December 25, 2008) was an American film and television actress. She is best remembered as the greedy cigarette-puffing femme fatale in the critically acclaimed film noir Detour (1945). She featured in more than 20 B movies between 1943 and 1946. Effectively leaving the film business in the mid 1950s, Savage made occasional appearances on television and worked for industrial and inspirational film producers from the 1950s to the 1970s. She made a number of live appearances at film festivals, especially for screenings of Detour. In 2007 she was cast by director Guy Maddin as his mother in My Winnipeg, "a part that had been tipped to bring her an Academy Award and which introduced her to a legion of new fans". Early life Ann Savage was born Berniece Maxine Lyon in Columbia, South Carolina. During her early years, her family moved often as her father, an officer in the United States Army, relocated from base to base. After he died when Berniece was four years old, her mother moved the two of them to Los Angeles. Growing up around the corner from the Jewelry District, the Broadway movie palaces of downtown Los Angeles served as her babysitter while her mother worked selling jewelry. She attended 64th Street Grammar School and Mount Vernon Junior High and first stepped on a sound stage at the age of 17 at MGM Studios and was screen tested by Edgar Selwyn. Ann spent time among the more famous Hollywood kids of the day, such as Lana Turner, Judy Garland, Freddie Bartholomew, and Deanna Durbin. Her MGM test did not work out, prompting her to get her teeth capped and acquire theatre training at the Max Reinhardt workshop on Sunset Boulevard. Reinhardt oversaw her name change, and Berniece became Ann Savage. The Reinhardt school's manager, Bert D'Armand, became Savage's agent, and the two later married. Savage was offered a screen test by Fox, but she decided not to turn up, as she knew the studio already had a bevy of pretty blondes. Career 1940s Savage instead made a screen test with Columbia Pictures—after playing Lorna in a Reinhardt acting showcase of Odet's Golden Boy"—and was offered a contract. Recalling Columbia mogul Harry Cohn as "a friendly Uncle type", Savage remembered Cohn being intimidated by acid-tongued Rosalind Russell. The two actresses featured together in What a Woman!,