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Jane Waddington Wyatt (born August 12, 1910 in Campgaw, New Jersey, died October 20, 2006 in Bel Air, California) was an American actress.
Her most famous roles were as Ronald Colman's love interest in Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937); as Margaret Anderson, the mother in the 1950s television comedy Father Knows Best; and as Amanda Grayson, Mr. Spock's mother on Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
She also appeared in other celebrated films, such as 1947's best picture Oscar winner, Gentleman's Agreement (with Gregory Peck), None but the Lonely Heart (with Cary Grant), and Boomerang (with Dana Andrews). Late in her career, she played Katherine Auschlander on the 1980s medical drama St. Elsewhere.
Wyatt's father, Christopher Billop Wyatt, Jr., was a Wall Street investment banker and her mother, the former Euphemia Van Rensselaer Waddington, was a drama critic for the Catholic World. One of her ancestors, Rufus King, had been a Presidential candidate. She had three siblings: Christopher III, Elizabeth, and Monica. She was also a distant cousin of Eleanor Roosevelt and the poet Harry Crosby, through their shared descent from Philip Livingston, a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence. Her mother was a Catholic convert, and her father ultimately converted as well, although Jane did not attend Catholic schools.
Wyatt was raised from the age of three months in New York City, attended the fashionable Chapin School and later Barnard College. After two years of college, she left to join the apprentice school of the Berkshire Playhouse at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where for six months she played a varied assortment of roles.
One of her first jobs on Broadway was as understudy to Rose Hobart in a production of Trade Winds - a career move that cost her her listing in the New York Social Register (she later was relisted upon her marriage). Receiving favorable notices on Broadway and celebrated for her understated beauty, Wyatt made the transition from stage to screen and was placed under contract at Universal (and co-starred in Frank Capra's Columbia film Lost Horizon on loan from Universal). Of her experience in Lost Horizon, she noted in an article in the St. Anthony Messenger newsletter, "During the war, they cut out all the pacifist parts of the film—the High Lama talking about peace in the world. All that was cut because they were trying to inspire those G.I.’s to get out there and go ‘bang! bang! bang!’ which sort of ruined the film."
Though one of her early suitors was John D. Rockefeller III, on November 9, 1935, Wyatt married investment broker Edgar Bethune Ward (he died in 2000). The couple met in the late 1920s, when both were weekend houseguests of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt at Hyde Park. The Wards had two surviving sons. According to Wyatt's obituary in the Washington Post, a third son died in infancy in the early 1940s.
In the 1950s, she co-starred with Robert Young in Father Knows Best, the classic TV show chronicling the life and times of the Anderson family in the Midwestern town of Springfield. She won the Emmy for best actress in a comedy for three years in a row for her role as Margaret Anderson. Her film career suffered because of her outspoken opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the chief figure in the anti-Communist hysteria of that era. As a result, she returned to her roots on the New York stage for a time and appeared in such plays as Lillian Hellman's The Autumn Garden opposite Fredric March.
Wyatt died on Friday, October 20, 2006 of natural causes in her home in Bel Air, California at the age of 96. She is survived by sons Christopher Ward, of Piedmont, California and Michael Ward of Los Angeles; three grandchildren Nicholas, Andrew and Laura; and five great-grandchildren.
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