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www.kansascity.com | 09/10/2007 | Oscar-winning actress Jane Wyman dies
Jane Wyman, an Oscar winner for portraying a deaf rape victim in “Johnny Belinda,” the star of the TV series “Falcon Crest” and Ronald Reagan’s first wife, died Monday.
The Missouri native’s age was unclear; some sources said she was 93, while her official Web site said she was 90.
Wyman got her start in films in the chorus of a 1932 Busby Berkeley movie beside other then-unknowns including Betty Grable and Paulette Goddard.
After a string of films in which she was “third from the right in the front row of the chorus,” she graduated to B movies playing, as Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper once said, “brassy dames whose most incisive piece of repartee was, ‘Oh, yeah?’ ” She changed her name to Wyman when she went under contract at Warner Bros. in 1936.
Like many actresses of the day, the light-haired Wyman at first bleached her hair Jean Harlow blond but eventually dyed it dark brown to be taken more seriously.
She finally got noticed by director Billy Wilder, who cast her opposite Ray Milland in the melodrama “The Lost Weekend,” about a would-be writer on a boozy weekend in New York. She didn’t waste her opportunity. The film won the Best Picture Oscar in 1946.
Her next major role was as Orry Baxter, the stern mother in “The Yearling,” which earned her an Oscar nomination and completed her transformation into serious actress and leading lady.
She lost, but won three years later for her portrayal of a deaf rape victim in the 1948 drama “Johnny Belinda.”
She got two other best actress nominations, for “The Blue Veil” (1951) and “Magnificent Obsession” (1954).
In 1955, she switched to television, hosting “The Jane Wyman Theater.” In the 1960s and ’70s, she devoted much of her time to raising money for the Arthritis Foundation.
From 1941 to 1949 she was married to Reagan, and after their divorce neither had much to say about the other.
In a rare 1968 reference, Wyman said, “It’s not because I’m bitter or because I don’t agree with him politically. I’ve always been a registered Republican, but it’s bad taste to talk about ex-husbands and ex-wives, that’s all. Also, I don’t know a damn thing about politics.”
Sarah Jane Mayfield Fulks was born in St. Joseph on Jan. 5, 1917. Her father died when she was young, and she was raised by her mother, who had ambitions for her daughter to be in Hollywood.
Wyman attended the University of Missouri-Columbia and for a time was a radio singer under the name of Jane Durrell.
Jane Wyman, an Oscar winner for portraying a deaf rape victim in “Johnny Belinda,” the star of the TV series “Falcon Crest” and Ronald Reagan’s first wife, died Monday.
The Missouri native’s age was unclear; some sources said she was 93, while her official Web site said she was 90.
Wyman got her start in films in the chorus of a 1932 Busby Berkeley movie beside other then-unknowns including Betty Grable and Paulette Goddard.
After a string of films in which she was “third from the right in the front row of the chorus,” she graduated to B movies playing, as Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper once said, “brassy dames whose most incisive piece of repartee was, ‘Oh, yeah?’ ” She changed her name to Wyman when she went under contract at Warner Bros. in 1936.
Like many actresses of the day, the light-haired Wyman at first bleached her hair Jean Harlow blond but eventually dyed it dark brown to be taken more seriously.
She finally got noticed by director Billy Wilder, who cast her opposite Ray Milland in the melodrama “The Lost Weekend,” about a would-be writer on a boozy weekend in New York. She didn’t waste her opportunity. The film won the Best Picture Oscar in 1946.
Her next major role was as Orry Baxter, the stern mother in “The Yearling,” which earned her an Oscar nomination and completed her transformation into serious actress and leading lady.
She lost, but won three years later for her portrayal of a deaf rape victim in the 1948 drama “Johnny Belinda.”
She got two other best actress nominations, for “The Blue Veil” (1951) and “Magnificent Obsession” (1954).
In 1955, she switched to television, hosting “The Jane Wyman Theater.” In the 1960s and ’70s, she devoted much of her time to raising money for the Arthritis Foundation.
From 1941 to 1949 she was married to Reagan, and after their divorce neither had much to say about the other.
In a rare 1968 reference, Wyman said, “It’s not because I’m bitter or because I don’t agree with him politically. I’ve always been a registered Republican, but it’s bad taste to talk about ex-husbands and ex-wives, that’s all. Also, I don’t know a damn thing about politics.”
Sarah Jane Mayfield Fulks was born in St. Joseph on Jan. 5, 1917. Her father died when she was young, and she was raised by her mother, who had ambitions for her daughter to be in Hollywood.
Wyman attended the University of Missouri-Columbia and for a time was a radio singer under the name of Jane Durrell.
