Jane Wyman has an incredible and illustrious career that included an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as a deaf-mute rape victim in Johnny Belinda, three Oscar nominations for The Yearling, The Blue Veil, and The Magnificent Obsession, the Walt Disney classic Pollyanna, a starring role in the Academy Award for Best Picture winner The Lost Weekend, and even a role in the Alfred Hitchcock film Stage Fright. After her retirement from the films, she even made a notable return in the early 1980’s in the primetime soap Falcon Crest.
It’s almost a shame that to someone like me, her biggest claim to fame was that she was the only person on Earth who was the ex-wife of a United States President. She had starred in two movies with Ronald Reagan, Brother Rat and Brother Rat and a Baby, released respectively in 1938 and 1940, before the two became engaged and married on January 26, 1940. The Reagans had two children, one of whom died in infancy, and adopted a third. Their marriage lasted until 1949.
It was over thirty years later – during the Falcon Crest run – that her ex-husband became President, making her the only woman once married to a Commander in Chief who never became the First Lady (except as prevented by death, such as the case with Martha Jefferson). Throughout his political career, she never spoke of her ex-husband as she thought it “bad taste to talk about ex-husbands.”
Although Jane Wyman was somewhat of a recluse by 1997 when I first wrote to her circa November of that year, she still was kind enough to autograph the 8×10 photographs that I sent along to her. This signed photos serves as quite an entry into my Hitchcock / Academy Award / and Presidential collection.
Autographs of 1997 will continue…
Then who’s VICE-President? Jerry Lewis?
I suppose Jane Wyman is the First Lady!
And Jack Benny is Secretary of the Treasury.
I’ve had enough practical jokes for one evening. Good night, Future Boy!
Of course, Reagan married Nancy in 1952 so Doc Brown shouldn’t have said this in 1955.
Chris
June 18th, 2009