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The Guardian (11/Sep/2007) - Obituary: Jane Wyman

(c) The Guardian (11/Sep/2007)

Obituary: Jane Wyman

Winner of an Oscar for a character unable to hear or speak, and first wife of Ronald Reagan

Jane Wyman, who has died aged 93, was an actor and an Oscar-winner. She was even a major box-office attraction in the late 1940s, a famously wide-eyed and poignant face as Johnny Belinda (1948), a character who could neither hear nor speak - or explain that her pregnancy was the result of rape.

As if on the wings of her soaring career, Wyman divorced her husband: an overly earnest man and an actor who had never quite gained real stardom. This seemed like an inevitable parting in the tough-minded ways of Hollywood. Yet the move did not work out. Within a few years of the divorce, Wyman's career faltered. Whereas, the earnest ex, by now remarried to another, lesser actor, was diligently meeting people and developing his political ideas. The guy was Ronald Reagan - patron saint of supporting actors in real-life romance. The second wife was Nancy. So Wyman is known to history as the first wife of a president-to-be, and the ironic epitome of bad timing.

But that scenario assumes she had ambitions to match those of Nancy Davis Reagan. In truth, Wyman was her own person, and that woman was thoroughly alarmed in 1948 by the way her husband was filling his head and their life with politics. Emotionally needy and insecure, she wanted to be the centre of his life.

The reasons for that make a story as sentimentally loaded as Johnny Belinda. In all the record books, she was Sarah Jane Fulks, born in St Joseph, Missouri, in 1914. But closer research - reported by Anne Edwards in her 1987 book, Early Reagan - suggests that she was adopted by the Fulks. She seems to have been born to Gladys and Manning Mayfield in 1917. Her real mother left the girl with the Fulks, both of whom were in their early 50s, as she went off job-hunting. There seems never to have been a formal adoption. But in 1923, when Sarah Jane began school, she simply took the name Fulks.

Again, many books suggest that Mrs Fulks took Sarah Jane to Los Angeles to try for a movie career when Sarah was only a child. It is more likely that the trip was to San Francisco to see her real father before he died. Sarah Jane would always give 1914 as her date of birth - thus, she was that true rarity, an actress who added to her actual age.

It was not an easy childhood. There was an incident when she and a school friend were discovered in a plan to run away. It was likely harmless, yet it received dramatic attention and left Sarah Jane more timid than ever. By her own account, she "could never trust or confide in anyone again ... until I met Ronnie." (There were even stories of a brief marriage when she was in her teens.)

By 1934, she was really in Hollywood, trying to get work as a dancer and singer. She made herself a blonde, she arched her eyebrows and stressed her button-nosed looks; she seemed very young, and she began to get small parts in musicals. In 1936, Warner Brothers put her under contract and changed her name to Jane Wyman. Then they cast her in B-pictures and comedies as a cheery, routine blonde. She was not making much progress, and she was notoriously anxious: thus, in 1936, she married a dress manufacturer, Myron Futterman, at least 15 years her senior. That lasted only 18 months. The divorce was filed for in November 1938, on grounds of mental cruelty and his reluctance to have a child. It may have been prompted by her new friendship with Reagan: they had just made Brother Rat (1938) together.

For several years, his career moved ahead of hers, though they made three more pictures together. But in 1945, restored as brunette, she got the part of the woeful romantic lead, trying to keep Ray Milland off the booze in The Lost Weekend. It was conventional work, but she was appealing and the movie drew huge attention; indeed, it won the best picture Oscar.

All of a sudden she was promoted - she sang You Do Something to Me in the bizarre Cole Porter biopic, Night and Day (1946); she was the mother in The Yearling (1946), and nominated as best actress; she played with James Stewart in Magic Town (1947); and then she got the coveted lead in Johnny Belinda.

Wyman had yearned for the part ever since 1940, when she and Reagan saw the play; that was also the year they were married. They had a daughter, Maureen, in 1941; and they adopted a boy, Michael, in 1945. But she resented his increasing involvement with the Screen Actors' Guild (he was elected president in 1947), and she lost another baby in 1946. That experience helped persuade producer Jerry Wald to give the role of Johnny Belinda.

That movie was shot on location, in Mendocino, northern California, and it was widely reported that Wyman was in love with her fellow actor, Lew Ayres, who played the doctor in the film. He was as liberal as Reagan was to become conservative, and it was anticipated that the couple would get married.

Divorce proceedings were under way between Wyman and Reagan when she won the Oscar for Johnny Belinda (defeating Ingrid Bergman in Joan of Arc, Olivia de Havilland in The Snake Pit, Irene Dunne in I Remember Mama, and Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number). Thereafter, her fortunes rose, though not always in successful films: thus she was rather eclipsed by Marlene Dietrich in Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950); and The Glass Menagerie (1950) was a failure, even though her Laura was praised by Tennessee Williams. She got another Oscar nomination, as the self-sacrificing heroine in the weepie The Blue Veil (1951). And she had big emotional roles in So Big (1953), from Edna Ferber, as the blinded woman in Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession (1954) - which earned her a fourth nomination - and as the woman who falls in love with her gardener in Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955).

From the late 1950s, her work was intermittent and gravitating towards television. She only came back to full public attention as vineyard owner matriarch Angela Channing in 212 episodes of the television series Falcon Crest (1981-90). She had two other marriages (though not to Lew Ayres), but most notable of all she never said a public word against her second husband. She is survived by Michael; Maureen predeceased her.

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