Anne Jeffreys, a musical theater performer who became an enduring presence on TV, starring as “the ghostess with the mostest” on the 1950s sitcom “Topper” and decades later as a glamorous presence on the soap opera “General Hospital” and its spinoff “Port Charles,” died Sept. 27 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94.

Her son Jeffreys Sterling confirmed the death but did not cite an immediate cause.

A lively Southern blonde, Jeffreys sang with opera companies in New York and worked as a Powers model before film scouts spotted her in a Hollywood musical revue. She appeared in low-budget westerns, thrillers and jungle pictures, and had a small role in “I Married an Angel” (1942), which marked the final screen pairing of the popular operetta team of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.

Jeffreys went on to vamp Frank Sinatra in a phone booth in the musical “Step Lively” (1944) and had leading roles opposite Lawrence Tierney in “Dillinger” (1945) – as the moll fatale known as the “lady in red” – and as the romantic foil to Pat O’Brien in the comedy “Riff-Raff” (1947). More often she was relegated to B pictures, including “Zombies on Broadway” (1945) with Bela Lugosi and eight pictures with the perennial western sidekick George “Gabby” Hayes.

She also had the recurring role of the decorative Tess Trueheart in the “Dick Tracy” film series, based on the cartoon and starring Morgan Conway as the square-jawed detective.

“I was in 36 pictures, most of them at the RKO studios,” Jeffreys told the Toronto Star in 1993. “They decided I could do any type of role, and I often ended up getting the kind of parts Joan Fontaine didn’t want. I never got in a very good picture with a good director.”

To rejuvenate her dwindling prospects, Jeffreys renewed her stage career with appearances in Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1946 and on Broadway in stagings of Kurt Weill and Langston Hughes’s “Street Scene” (1947) and Sigmund Romberg and Rowland Leigh’s “My Romance” (1948).

In 1950, she replaced Patricia Morison in Cole Porter’s hit musical comedy “Kiss Me, Kate,” one of the most popular stage musicals of all time.

Not long after, Jeffreys teamed with her husband, the debonair actor Robert Sterling, in a hit nightclub act. In 1953, they became household names as stars of CBS’s “Topper,” based on the Thorne Smith novels and the 1937 film comedy starring Cary Grant and Constance Bennett.

Jeffreys and Sterling played George and Marion Kerby, mischievous millionaires who die in an avalanche while skiing and return as ghosts to haunt their home and its new occupant, a strait-laced banker named Cosmo Topper (Leo Carroll).

Jeffreys and Sterling went on to other ventures. They co-starred in the short-lived ABC series “Love That Jill” (1958), as the heads of two competing modeling agencies, and appeared together in regional productions of musicals including “Camelot” and “The King and I.”

Sterling semiretired from acting in the 1960s to focus on business endeavors, including manufacturing golf clubs, but Jeffreys remained a stage and TV stalwart, notably as the mother of David Hasselhoff on “Baywatch” and as widowed socialite and hospital board member Amanda Barrington on ABC’s “General Hospital” from 1984 to 2000 and “Port Charles” from 1999 to 2003. She also appeared on the prime-time soap “Falcon Crest” and other series, often in snooty parts.

“I seem to be typecast as wealthy society ladies,” she told the Associated Press at the start of her long run on “General Hospital.” “That’s fine with me. People always think of me as being terribly sophisticated. I’m not at all. Robert always says I’m a baggy-pants comedian.”

Anne Jeffreys Carmichael was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, on Jan. 26, 1923. She began appearing on local radio as a child, encouraged by a steel-willed mother once described as “a guided missile with charm.”

In addition to performing, Jeffreys was involved in charitable causes, including Childhelp USA, which aids victims of child abuse, and animal rescue groups.

The HBO comedy series “Getting On,” set in an eldercare unit of a California hospital, marked Jeffreys’ final screen appearance, in 2013. “My life has been a full, happy and active one,” she once said, “and I hope I’ll always be as busy as a blind dog in a meat shop. I thrive on activity.”