NEW YORK, NY.- Kathryn Crosby, a Texas-born beauty queen and aspiring actress who put aside her movie career when she married Bing Crosby, the movie star and honey-voiced baritone, died Friday at her home in Hillsborough, California. She was 90.

Harlan Boll, a publicist speaking for her family, announced her death.

The couple met cute on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles in 1953. Kathryn Grant, as she was then known, was a new contract player rushing to deliver a load of petticoats to the wardrobe department while on her way to a tennis game. Crosby, the laconic, blue-eyed heart throb, was already an American institution.

“What’s your rush, Tex?” Crosby asked, standing in the door of his dressing room. She stopped short, and down went the petticoats and her tennis racket.

They kept colliding, though less dramatically, in the days that followed — Kathryn Crosby even tried out for a part in one of Bing Crosby’s big hits, “White Christmas.” When she asked to interview the star for her column, “Texas Girl in Hollywood,” which was running in several Texas newspapers, he finagled the appointment into a dinner date at Chasen’s, the Hollywood canteen. On the drive home, he took her hand and sang “You’d Be So Easy to Love.” She was 19; he was 49.

Their courtship was far from easy, though Bing Crosby proposed that year. The star, beloved for his public image as a laid-back everyman, was diffident and mercurial. He disappeared for months at a time, set wedding dates and broke them — once because, as he joked, he’d left his toupee at home, and once because another romantic entanglement had threatened suicide. He was also involved with Grace Kelly, his co-star in “The Country Girl” and “High Society.” He and Kathryn finally married in a Las Vegas courthouse in 1957.

Kathryn Crosby had worked steadily since her arrival in Hollywood, with a slew of uncredited roles as well as bit parts in movies including “Rear Window” (1954) and “My Sister Eileen” (1955). She worked mostly for Columbia Pictures, which signed her after she was dropped by Paramount.

She had a starring role as a princess in “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad,” a 1958 fantasy adventure film, and appeared in the courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), starring James Stewart and George C. Scott. (Bosley Crowther, in his review for The New York Times, deemed Crosby excellent in her supporting role.)

But after her marriage and the birth of her three children, Harry, Mary Frances and Nathaniel, her husband urged her to turn away from acting. She worked occasionally as a model for designer Jean Louis and performed in several summer stock productions, activities that irritated her husband, who had old-fashioned ideas about marriage.

Bing Crosby was constantly on the move — if he wasn’t on a film set, he was playing golf, hunting or fishing, often in exotic locales, and he expected his young wife to run a tight household back home in Hillsborough, south of San Francisco.

She was often scolded, as she wrote in her 1983 memoir, “My Life With Bing,” for being a lax housekeeper and disciplinarian. He scolded her, too, for her pursuit of a nursing degree, which she earned in 1963 — she earned a teaching certificate, too — studies that in Bing Crosby’s view encouraged more “neglect” of her family duties.

Once, while Bing Crosby was on an extended solo vacation in Biarritz, France, he proposed she leave their children with him and a young French stewardess, one of a few “nannies” he tried to foist on Kathryn Crosby, who gamely prevailed. (Her technique with the French interloper was simply to leave the children with the young woman for the day, after which she promptly quit.)

Kathryn Crosby was never cowed by her domineering husband, whom she said she adored. She appeared in the Crosby family Christmas specials, an annual television staple, and in Minute Maid orange juice commercials, another family affair. (The last Christmas special, in 1977, aired after Bing Crosby’s death and was introduced by Kathryn Crosby; it featured an exquisite duet between Bing Crosby and David Bowie, in which they wove “Peace on Earth” with “The Little Drummer Boy,” now a Christmas classic.)

“For our whole 20 years of married life Bing alternately implored and enjoined me to get organized,” Kathryn Crosby wrote with typical brio. “It was very much like ordering a government to reduce inflation.”

Olive Kathryn Grandstaff was born Nov. 25, 1933, in Houston and grew up in West Columbia, Texas, an hour away. Her father, Delbert Grandstaff, a former Marine, was a high school football coach; her mother, Olive (Stokely) Grandstaff, was an elementary schoolteacher.

Kathryn was 3 when she entered her first beauty pageant, where she was crowned “Splash Day Princess.”

Later, as rodeo queen of a Houston stock show and exposition, she impressed a talent scout in the audience, who suggested she might have a future in Hollywood, especially if she lost her Texas accent. She studied drama at the University of Texas at Austin and moved to Los Angeles a year shy of her degree, which she earned a few years later by attending summer school.

Bing Crosby was named “Hollywood’s Most Typical Father” in 1937. But his home life with his first wife, Dixie Lee, whom he married in 1930, was troubled.

He was an absent father and, when home, a cold and frightening disciplinarian. Dixie Lee, an alcoholic, died of ovarian cancer in 1952, when she was 42. Their four sons all suffered from alcoholism, and two, Lindsay and Dennis, died by suicide, in 1989 and 1991. Gary, Bing Crosby’s oldest son, wrote of his chaotic upbringing in his memoir, “Going My Own Way” (1983).

Kathryn Crosby’s memoir, which painted a warmer family life, came out the same year. At the time, Gary Crosby was quoted as saying his father seemed to be raising his second family more carefully.

Bing Crosby died of a heart attack in October 1977 after completing a round of golf at a course outside Madrid. He was 74, and had appeared in 58 movies during his half-century career. “I can’t think of any better way for a golfer who sings for a living to finish the round,” Kathryn Crosby told reporters.

Kathryn Crosby is survived by her three children — Harry, a former actor turned investment banker; Mary, an actress best known for her role on “Dallas,” the 1980s nighttime soap, as Kristin Shepard, the character who shot J.R. Ewing, the show’s amoral oil baron; and Nathaniel, a golfer who played on the amateur circuit and hosted his father’s charitable tournament, the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am — and many grandchildren.

She married Maurice William Sullivan, an educator who had tutored her children and who later became a trustee of the Crosby estate, in 2000. Sullivan died in 2010, when the couple’s car veered off a highway and struck a boulder. Kathryn Crosby was seriously injured in the accident.

At Bing Crosby’s death, Kathryn Crosby told The Associated Press that she had been rereading his love letters, which revealed, she said, that he was “a pretty cute kid when it came to convincing a girl that what she really wanted to do was stay at home and scrub floors.”

“He didn’t know that he was a male chauvinist pig — but he was, of course,” she said.

“I expected Bing to live to be at least 92,” Kathryn Crosby added, said, “and I never felt that Bing was much older than 14.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.