Academy Award winning actress Jane Wyman began her film career in the 1930s, and was a prolific performer for two decades. She received an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in Johnny Belinda (1948), and later achieved success during the 1980s for her leading role in the television series Falcon Crest.

Born Sarah Jane Mayfield on January 5, 1917 in St. Joseph, Missouri to Manning Jefferies Mayfield, a meal-company laborer, and (Gladys) Hope Christian, a doctor's stenographer and office assistant.(Although her birth date has been widely reported for many years as January 4, 1914, research by biographers and genealogists indicate that she was born on January 5, 1917.) The most likely reason for the 1914 date is that she added to her age when beginning her career as a minor, so that she could work. After Wyman's death, a release posted on her official website confirmed these details. In October 1921, her mother filed for divorce, and her father died unexpectedly the following year at age 27. After her father's death, her mother moved to Cleveland, Ohio, leaving her to be reared by foster parents, Emma and Richard D. Fulks, the chief of detectives in Saint Joseph. She took their surname unofficially, including in her school records and, apparently, her first marriage certificate.

In 1928, Wyman moved to southern California where she attempted, with the help of her mother, to break into films. Unable to find work, they moved back to Missouri two years later.

After attending the University of Missouri; she began a career as a radio singer, which led her to another name change to Jane Durrell. She then changed Durrell to Wyman and made her first film in 1935 as a chorus dancer in the musical King of Burlesque. Wyman signed with Warner Bros. studio in 1936 and made her film acting debut the next year with a bit part in Gold Diggers of 1937.

Wyman toiled for a decade in mostly B-movie fare and supporting roles in bigger films. But she gained notice in 1945 for her role as the girlfriend of a chronic alcoholic in Billy Wilder's drama The Lost Weekend. Wyman went on to give a string of Oscar-nominated performances, beginning with The Yearling opposite Gregory Peck in 1946.

She won the Oscar as best actress for her 1948 role as a teenage deaf-mute raped in Johnny Belinda, the first person in the sound era to win an acting Oscar without speaking a line of dialogue.

Two more Oscar nominations came for the 1951 drama Blue Veil with Charles Laughton and the 1954 Douglas Sirk-directed romance Magnificent Obsession, opposite Rock Hudson. Wyman's film career stretched to 1969's How to Commit Marriage, co-starring Bob Hope and Jackie Gleason. Other notable films included The Glass Menagerie (1950) and All That Heaven Allows (1955).

Wyman also began a television career in the 1950s, hosting the drama anthology series Jane Wyman Presents the Fireside Theatre. And from 1981 to 1990 she played the tough, empire-building matriarch Angela Channing in the CBS melodrama Falcon Crest.

Jane Wyman died on September 10, 2007, at her home in Rancho Mirage, California at the age of 90.

MARRIAGES

• In 1937, Wyman married a wealthy manufacturer of children's clothes, Myron Futterman, in New Orleans. They divorced the following year, declaring she wanted children and he did not.
• The actress married another Warner studio contract actor, Ronald Reagan, in 1940. The following year she gave birth to a daughter, Maureen. They later adopted a son, Michael, who became a conservative radio host. The couple also had a daughter who was born several months premature in June 1947 and died a day later.
• Jane Wyman and Reagan divorced in 1948. Their daughter Maureen died in August 2001 after a battle with cancer. Wyman attended the funeral but Reagan, suffering from Alzheimer's disease, was not well enough to attend.
• In 1952 Wyman married Fred Karger, a studio music director. They divorced, later remarried and divorced the second time in 1965.

Sources

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Wyman
• http://www.biography.com/articles/Jane-Wyman-245894
• http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/contributor/1800039836/bio