Los Angeles – Jane Wyman, the Academy Award-winning actress whose long and distinguished film and television career was nearly overshadowed by her real-life role as the first wife of actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan, died Monday. She was 93.
Wyman died at her desert home in Rancho Mirage of age-related causes, said Virginia Zamboni, a longtime friend.
Wyman’s son, radio personality Michael Reagan, said in a statement Monday: “I have lost a loving mother, my children Cameron and Ashley have lost a loving grandmother, my wife Colleen has lost a loving friend she called Mom, and Hollywood has lost the classiest lady to ever grace the silver screen.”
After arriving in Hollywood from St. Louis in the mid-1930s, Wyman learned her craft as a contract player before getting a crack at the major roles that would secure her reputation as a star. She won an Oscar playing a deaf-mute rape victim in 1948’s “Johnny Belinda” and was nominated for “The Yearling” (1946), “The Blue Veil” (1951) and “Magnificent Obsession” (1954).
In the 1950s, the early days of television, she staked out a career in that medium with her own half-hour dramatic anthology show. And years after her film career waned, she became familiar to millions more television viewers as the matriarch-you-love-to-hate in the long-running 1980s CBS nighttime soap opera “Falcon Crest.” Still, hardly ever was Wyman’s name mentioned in print without also referring to the second of her three husbands.
When they met in 1938, Reagan was a fellow actor under contract with Warner Bros. After a well-publicized courtship, they wed Jan. 26, 1940.
Wyman bore the couple two daughters, one of whom died after a premature birth and the other, Maureen Reagan, who died of melanoma in 2001 at 60. They adopted their son Michael before divorcing in 1948.
Theirs would have been just another Hollywood marriage that landed on the rocks had Reagan not gone on to be governor of California and the 40th president of the United States.
Reagan, who by then was married to Nancy Davis and had two more children, was the first American president to have been divorced. That bestowed on Wyman the dubious honor of being the first ex-wife of an American president.
Much to Wyman’s irritation, she was the subject of constant questioning about Reagan, despite her well-known refusal to speak of him because she considered it “bad taste to talk about ex-husbands and ex-wives.” She was known to get up and leave an interview if a writer brought up his name.
“I made 86 films and 350 television shows,” she told Newsday in 1989. “I’ve been in this business 54 years.”
Wyman was a familiar face to millions of fans and a prominent member of Old Hollywood. Her co-stars ranged from Gregory Peck in “The Yearling” to the young Rock Hudson, whose first starring role was opposite Wyman in “Magnificent Obsession.” She also starred with Hudson in “All That Heaven Allows,” which was the inspiration for writer-director Todd Haynes’ “Far From Heaven” in 2002.
Her other starring roles included the 1953 screen version of Edna Ferber’s best-selling novel “So Big” and “Miracle in the Rain,” a 1956 World War II love story. She was the stern aunt won over by Hayley Mills in 1960’s “Pollyanna.”
Wyman’s last major film was with Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason in “How to Commit Marriage” in 1969.
The remainder of her acting career was primarily in television, highlighted by her starring role on “Falcon Crest.”
