She had married Harry Karl, a wealthy shoe retailer, in 1960, but by the time they divorced in 1973, he had gambled away or otherwise misspent his fortune and hers. Ms. Reynolds set out to re-establish herself financially.

She headed to New York that year to make her Broadway debut in a revival of the 1920s musical “Irene,” for which she received a Tony Award nomination for best actress in a musical. In 1976, she had a short-lived one-woman Broadway show, “Debbie.” She made her last Broadway appearance in 1983, taking over the role originated by Lauren Bacall in the musical version of “Woman of the Year.” She later toured the country with stage shows including a new version of “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

She had taken her musical and comedy talents to Las Vegas as early as 1960 and became a fixture there in the ’70s and ’80s. She and her third husband, Richard Hamlett, a Virginia real estate developer, established their own hotel, casino and movie-memorabilia museum there. But there were financial problems, and the property had to be sold in the ’90s.

A decade or so later, it looked as if Ms. Reynolds would finally find a permanent home for her Hollywood memorabilia museum, this time in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., the home of Dolly Parton’s theme park, Dollywood. But that, too, fell through, and in 2011, a large portion of her collection was auctioned at the Paley Center in Beverly Hills.

Two sales, the first in June and the second in December, took in a little more than $25 million, including $4.6 million for the dress Marilyn Monroe wore in the famous subway-grate scene in “The Seven Year Itch.”

For a while, Ms. Reynolds seemed to be better known as the mother of Ms. Fisher — who shot to stardom as Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” movies and wrote semiautobiographical novels — than as an actress or singer. Ms. Fisher’s 1987 book, “Postcards From the Edge,” made into a film starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine, reflected the sometimes difficult relationship between her and her famous mother.