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Ex-Wife Role Was Toughest To Shake Off

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Los Angeles Times

Published: September 11, 2007

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 in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 90.

She won an 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 a fellow actor under contract with Warner Bros. After a well-publicized courtship, they wed on 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 also adopted their son Michael Reagan 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 explained in 1989. 'I've been in this business 54 years.'

Rarely did she break her silence about her former husband, with the exception of a statement after his death on June 5, 2004: 'America has lost a great president and a great, kind and gentle man.'

Reagan's 1990 autobiography, 'An American Life,' mentions his marriage to Wyman only to say that it had produced 'two wonderful children' but that it 'didn't work out.'

With her brown eyes, turned-up nose and signature dark hairdo - a pageboy with bangs - 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.'

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' on CBS.

Sarah Jane Mayfield Fulks was born in St. Joseph, Mo. 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 and for a time was a radio singer under the name of Jane Durrell.

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