Debbie Reynolds, the wholesome ingénue in 1950s films like “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Tammy and the Bachelor,” died on Wednesday, a day after the death of her daughter, the actress Carrie Fisher. She was 84.

Marie Frances Reynolds was born in El Paso, Texas; when she was 8, her carpenter father moved the family to Burbank. At age 16, “Frannie” entered the Miss Burbank Contest, winning in 1948 for her imitation of Betty Hutton singing “My Rockin’ Horse Ran Away.” She was spotted by Warner Bros. talent scout Solly Baiano, who signed her to a $65-a-week contract. Studio head Jack Warner renamed her Debbie — against her wishes, she said. With the promise of a better job, Ray moved to California when Mary Frances was 7, and the family soon followed. Her career dream was to go to college and become a gym teacher, she often said, but when she was named Miss Burbank 1948, everything changed. Two of the judges were movie-studio scouts, and she was soon under contract to Warner Bros., which changed her name.

In 1950, she had her first screen credit in “The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady,” a musical comedy starring June Haver and Gordon MacRae. (Two years earlier she had a small uncredited part in “June Bride.”) The same year, she played Helen Kane, the 1920s singer known as the boop-boop-a-doop girl, in “Three Little Words” and also appeared in “Two Weeks With Love,” in which she sang “Aba Daba Honeymoon” with Carleton Carpenter. The song became a huge novelty hit.

Her roles seemed to mirror 1950s attitudes toward love, marriage and family. In 1955, she played a marriage-minded all-American girl opposite Frank Sinatra in “The Tender Trap.” In 1956, she starred with her new husband, Mr. Fisher, in “Bundle of Joy,” a musical remake of the 1939 comedy “Bachelor Mother.”

Ms. Reynolds’s career included a best-actress Academy Award nomination for playing the title role in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” (1964), a rags-to-riches western musical based on a true story.

Many argue that her best-remembered film is probably “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), the classic MGM musical about 1920s moviemaking, in which she held her own with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor, although she was only 19 when the movie was shot and had never danced professionally before. Her fans may cherish her sentimental good-girl portrayals, like the title role in “Tammy and the Bachelor” (1957), in which she played a Louisiana moonshiner’s wide-eyed granddaughter who spouted folksy wisdom.

She took a stab at series television with a sitcom, “The Debbie Reynolds Show” (1969), in which she played a wacky Lucy Ricardo-like wife who wanted to be a journalist like her husband. It lasted only one season. But she soon achieved a kind of immortality as the voice of Charlotte the selfless spider in the animated film version of E. B. White’s children’s classic “Charlotte’s Web” (1973).