She “arrived” in 1952 in Stanley Donen’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” playing what she was at the time: a minty-fresh ingénue. She stayed one for most of the decade. She worked again the next year with Mr. Donen in the Marge and Gower Champion vehicle “Give a Girl a Break.” (Compared with the other movie, this one could have been called “Singin’ in the Mud.”) Her character was a brunette starling named Suzy Doolittle, because … of course. There’s a part for Bob Fosse, who, with Ms. Reynolds, does the singing and most of the dancing. But in their big number together, Ms. Reynolds is as much an athlete as he is an artist. She spent her career outpacing the other men she worked with — Frank Sinatra, Glenn Ford, Leslie Nielsen, James Garner, Dick Van Dyke.

Even after Eddie Fisher, her first husband, outpaced her, leaving her at 26 with two kids, for Elizabeth Taylor, she kept going, never appearing to seek a part that would bring what you would call catharsis. Taylor, meanwhile, kept looking for parts to unleash a darker side. She became drama incarnate. Ms. Reynolds was, as they say, a trouper. So she did what came naturally to her: She trouped.