Jane Wyman

Jane Wyman, the Missouri-born actress who won an Academy Award for Johnny Belinda and later ruled a television dynasty as Angela Channing on Falcon Crest, died in Palm Springs, California, on September 10, 2007. She was ninety. Born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph, Missouri, on January 5, 1917, she reached Warner Bros. as a chorus-and-contract player, changed her name, and worked her way from light comedy into parts that required silence as much as speech. Johnny Belinda (1948) made her the first actor since the silent era to win an Oscar for a role without spoken dialogue. The Yearling, The Glass Menagerie, and Magnificent Obsession kept her in the front rank of mid-century Hollywood drama. Her marriage to Ronald Reagan — the first of his two — made them a studio couple before politics claimed him; she left the marriage years before the White House and rarely fed the nostalgia industry that followed. In the 1980s Falcon Crest gave her a second stardom as a sharp, armored matriarch, proof that television could use the same steel Hollywood once reserved for the big screen. She died in Palm Springs after years of relative privacy. The Oscar and the serial both survive; so does the image of an actress who treated craft as a job, not a confession.