Dana Wynter, an actress best known for her role in the 1956 science-fiction classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” has died. She was 79.

Wynter died Thursday of congestive heart failure at Ojai Valley Community Hospital’s Continuing Care Center in Southern California, said her son, Mark Bautzer.

She portrayed Becky Driscoll, the love interest of Kevin McCarthy’s Dr. Miles Bennell in “Body Snatchers,” director Don Siegel’s tale of a small town whose residents were being replaced by emotionless duplicates grown in pods.

“Wynter is quite attractively English, and very different from the ‘average’ sci-fi leading ladies of the ’50s, many of whom were pinup girl-types none too convincingly playing scientists or biologists,” Tom Weaver, a science-fiction film expert, told the Los Angeles Times on Saturday in an e-mail. “She’s chic and smart, and yet has a bit of a girl next door quality — provided you live next door to Windsor Castle.”

Film critic Leonard Maltin in his “2011 Movie Guide” said “Body Snatchers” was “classic, influential and still very scary.” The film became a cult classic in part for what Maltin called its “McCarthy-era subtext.”

Wynter told Weaver in a 1999 interview for Starlog magazine: “It was just supposed to be a plain, thrilling kind of picture. That was what Allied Artists thought they were making. … We realized … that we were making an anti-ism picture. Anti-ism — fascism, communism, all that kind of thing.

“We took it for granted that’s what we were making but it wasn’t spoken about openly on the set or anything like that.”

Bautzer said his mother didn’t think the role would come to define her and “she didn’t consider acting a worthy profession for an adult.”