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 90.
Wyman, who had been in failing health for several years, died at her home in Rancho Mirage, said Michael Mesnick, her longtime business manager.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, September 15, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 65 words Type of Material: Correction
Wyman obituary: The obituary of actress Jane Wyman in Tuesday's California section stated that she was born Sarah Jane Mayfield Fulks. According to a biography approved by her family and posted on a tribute website, she was born Sarah Jane Mayfield and "assumed the name Sarah Jane Fulks in honor of her neighbors, Richard and Emma Fulks, who unofficially adopted her after her father died."
Wyman's son, radio personality Michael Reagan, said in a statement: "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."
Veteran Paramount producer A.C. Lyles, who first met Wyman in the late 1930s through his friendship with Reagan, told The Times that Wyman "was not only a fine actress but a darling, dear lady."
"I think she was an inspiration to all young actresses because she started as a minor actress and worked her way through the ranks to become not only one of Hollywood's prominent leading ladies but an Academy Award winner," he said.
After arriving in Hollywood from St. Louis in the mid-1930s, Wyman learned her craft as a contract player before getting a chance at the major roles that would secure her reputation as a star. She won her Oscar playing a deaf-mute rape victim in 1948's "Johnny Belinda" and was nominated for her performances in "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 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.
At the time they met in 1938, Reagan was an actor under contract with Warner Bros. After a well-publicized courtship, they wed Jan. 26, 1940, at Wee Kirk O' the Heather Church at Forest Lawn in Glendale.
The couple had two daughters, one of whom died after a premature birth. The other, Maureen Reagan, died of melanoma in 2001 at age 60. They also adopted a 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 become governor of California and the 40th president of the United States.
