Jane Wyman; ex-wife of Reagan won Oscar for 'Johnny Belinda'

WASHINGTON - Jane Wyman - who won an Academy Award as best actress for "Johnny Belinda," in which she did not speak a word - died Monday at her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif.

Ms. Wyman also starred in the soap opera "Falcon Crest" while her former husband, Ronald Reagan, was in the White House. She gave her age as 90, but other biographical sources say she was 93.

In a career spanning six decades and more than 80 films, Ms. Wyman earned Oscar nominations for "The Yearling" (1946), as the backwoods wife of Gregory Peck; "The Blue Veil" (1951), as a nursemaid viewed over many decades; and "Magnificent Obsession" (1954), as a blind woman romanced by a playboy (Rock Hudson) who accidentally killed her saintly husband. Taken together with "Johnny Belinda" (1948), in which she played a deaf-mute rape victim, her role choices "established her as a stimulant to tears" for a generation of moviegoers, film scholar David Thomson once wrote.

Ms. Wyman had spent a decade unhappily appearing in light comedy parts before she saw "Johnny Belinda" as her path to dramatic success. To prepare for the film, Ms. Wyman spent days with a young, deaf-mute woman.

Learning the woman's gestures was not enough, Ms. Wyman said at the time.

"Even after weeks of [screen] tests . . . something was missing," she said. "Suddenly I realized what was wrong. I could hear. I could act deaf, but it lacked a realistic feeling, and that showed in my face."

Director Jean Negulesco had the solution: Seal Ms. Wyman's ears with wax. She also isolated herself from other cast members. It was "a terrifying time." she said. "The silence was new, frightening."

While making "Johnny Belinda," she ended her eight-year marriage to Reagan, then a B-list actor starting his political career in the Screen Actors Guild. Initially attracted to his modest and mild demeanor, Ms. Wyman said, they grew apart as she focused more on her fast-moving career and he on his political interests.

She once described becoming bored by his breakfast table commentary "expounding on the far right, far left, the conservative right, the conservative left."

They had a daughter and adopted a son. Another child died in 1947, soon after childbirth, and Ms. Wyman left for New York. She announced to a reporter her dissatisfaction with the marriage, but neglected to tell Reagan, who tried to win her back before giving up. In 1952, Reagan married actress Nancy Davis.

While Reagan was president in the 1980s, Ms. Wyman played wine country matriarch Angela Channing on the prime-time CBS soap opera "Falcon Crest." She forbade reporters to ask about her former husband. She said she thought she had long proved herself as an actress and celebrity in her own right and walked away from those who asked about subjects she considered off-limits.

Born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph, Mo., she never clarified the circumstances of her childhood and early life, which some biographers say included a teenage marriage to a mystery man with the surname Wyman.

As a child, she was unofficially adopted by a middle-aged couple named Fulks, whose last name she took. She later told Guideposts magazine they were humorless and unforgiving, and that "all through grade school, I was a well-mannered little shadow who never spoke above a whisper."

After a road show visited her town, she begged to take dance lessons and Mrs. Fulks finally agreed. Her dance teacher's son, LeRoy Prinz, was a Hollywood dance director and later helped her get unbilled chorus parts in musicals such as "The Kid from Spain" (1932) with Eddie Cantor.

Ms. Wyman took modeling and secretarial jobs to support herself. Her biggest role at the time, in a party scene in the William Powell-Carole Lombard screwball comedy "My Man Godfrey" (1936), was mostly cut.

She grieved at the time, but later tried to have a sense of humor: "I'm still in the picture, next to the monkey and the organ grinder. . . . That monkey bit me, too."

In 1936, she received a long-term contract at Warner Bros. She began an apprenticeship singing, dancing, or looking adorable in untaxing roles such as "Mr. Dodd Takes the Air" (1937) with Kenny Baker; "He Couldn't Say No" (1938) with Frank McHugh; and the military academy comedy "Brother Rat" (1938), where she met co-star Reagan.

At the time, she was divorcing her husband, Myron Futterman, a dress manufacturer almost twice her age.

Ms. Wyman began her rise to credible dramatic actress with the help of screenwriter Charles Brackett. He admired her unexpected tenderness in the otherwise forgettable wartime comedy "Princess O'Rourke" (1943) and brought her to the attention of his writing partner, the director Billy Wilder.

Wilder cast her as the forgiving fiancee of alcoholic Ray Milland in "The Lost Weekend" (1945), one of the first movies not to play alcoholism for laughs. Years later, she told an interviewer she was ecstatic about the part: "I was conditioned to thinking of myself as a comedienne. The dramatic parts I knew I could handle well seemed to be always denied me."

"Johnny Belinda" was the peak of her career. In 1949, Warner Bros. hoped to capitalize on her popularity in comedies with David Niven ("A Kiss in the Dark") and Dennis Morgan ("The Lady Takes a Sailor"), but both were poorly received. After appearing in "Magnificent Obsession" and "All That Heaven Allows" - both weepy dramas of the mid-1950s with Rock Hudson - she largely disappeared from the screen. She was Hayley Mills's aunt in "Pollyanna" (1960), and Bob Hope's unhappy wife in her last film, "How to Commit Marriage" (1969).

She found suitable roles harder to find, telling the New York Times in 1981: "Murderers, old ladies that were senile - they were awful. . . . And every time I'd read one of those scripts, I'd look in the mirror and say, 'How could they think of me for this?' "

On "Falcon Crest," she reportedly used her additional role as consultant to maintain strict standards of on-set behavior. Her clashes with actress Lana Turner, whom she viewed as overly demanding, led to the death of Turner's recurring character.

After divorcing Reagan, she twice married and divorced film studio composer Fred Karger. She converted to Catholicism and devoted much of her time to charitable causes and landscape painting.

She was comfortable with solitude, telling one reporter: "I have always felt that I was essentially alone at the beginning of my life, and that I will be essentially alone at the end of it."

A daughter, Maureen Reagan, died in 2001. She leaves a son, radio talk show host Michael Reagan of Sherman Oaks, Calif., and two grandchildren.