The Times (26/Oct/2006) - Obituary: Jane Wyatt
(c) The Times (26/Oct/2006)
- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article613562.ece
- keywords: Academy Awards, Cary Grant, Ethel Barrymore, Gregory Peck, Jane Wyatt, John Galsworthy, New York City, New York, Norman Lloyd, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (TV)
Obituary: Jane Wyatt
Veteran actress who specialised in devoted characters and played Mr Spock's mother in Star Trek
Jane Wyatt enjoyed a long and successful career in films, television and theatre, typically playing devoted sweethearts, wives and, latterly, mothers.
One of her first movies was Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon (1937), in which she tempts Ronald Colman to turn his back on the modern world and return to the enchanted Shangri-La. She went on to make films with Gary Cooper, Cary Grant and Gregory Peck and attained minor cult status when she played Mr Spock’s human mother, Amanda, first in the Sixties television series and then in the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).
She is best known in the US as Margaret Anderson, the patient wife and mother, in the sitcom Father Knows Best (1954-60). The role brought her three Emmy awards but also provoked controversy for its cosy portrait of family life. Its very title was anathema for many but Wyatt defended her character as “the power behind the throne”. Initially she had turned it down, but her husband suggested she reconsider. Springfield, the name of the setting was later used as the home town of the satirical cartoon The Simpsons.
Wyatt was a petite brunette and her characters sometimes seemed a little safe and unexciting. Typical was her role in the Andre de Toth film noir Pitfall (1948), with Dick Powell as an insurance agent, Wyatt as the high-school sweetheart he married and Lizabeth Scott as the femme fatale who shatters their domestic harmony.
Born in Campgaw, New Jersey, in 1910, Jane Waddington Wyatt came from a distinguished old family and her father was a wealthy banker. She was reputedly courted by John D. Rockefeller, but married the financial broker Edgar Ward in 1935. They were together for 65 years till Ward’s death in 2000.
Her career was seriously threatened in the early 1950s when she fell victim to the anti-communist witch-hunts. One allegation was that she had been “prematurely anti-fascist”.
She had studied history and drama at the exclusive Barnard College in New York, appeared on Broadway in 1931 in the melodrama Give Me Yesterday and made her film debut three years later in James Whale’s 1934 version of the John Galsworthy novel One More River. In the same year she played Estella in Great Expectations.
In Lost Horizon she was Sondra Bizet, an inhabitant of the remote Himalayan country of Shangri-La. Romance blossoms between her and Colman after his plane crashes in the mountains. He returns to the outside world but cannot forget Shangri-La or Sondra, and returns in an attempt to recapture the peace and happiness he tasted there.
She appeared with Cary Grant and Ethel Barrymore in None but the Lonely Heart (1944) and with Gregory Peck in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning drama about anti-semitism. That year she also played the wife of state attorney Dana Andrews in Kazan’s Boomerang!
She was a doctor on the frontier of civilisation in Canadian Pacific (1949), with Randolph Scott, airman Gary Cooper’s wife in Task Force (1949), and another wife in the film noir The Man Who Cheated Himself (1950), which marked something of a departure from her normal beat. Her character has an affair with a detective, Lee J. Cobb, and ends up shooting her husband.
Wyatt worked extensively in television and theatre as well as cinema, which helped when she found herself on the Hollywood blacklist.
Other notable TV credits include Wagon Train (1962), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1965), Happy Days (1982) and the medical drama series St Elsewhere (1983-88), in which she had a recurring role, once more as a wife, playing the spouse of Dr Auschlander (Norman Lloyd).
She is survived by two sons.
