Jane Wyman

The silence that won an Oscar

Jane Wyman wasn't born Jane Wyman. Her name was Sarah Jane Mayfield, and during the 1930s she was just one more face in the chorus lines at Warner Bros. Nobody in the front offices expected that the round-eyed girl would end up earning 150,000 dollars per film.

Her rise was anything but explosive. It was a matter of sheer persistence. She spent years taking on roles as the dumb blonde or the star's best friend until, in 1945, she crossed paths with Billy Wilder. That director gave her a chance in Day of Reckoning, and audiences discovered that Wyman knew how to look into the camera with a gravity no one had asked of her before.

And the gamble paid off.

In 1948, she decided that to earn the respect of the industry, she had to stop talking. She plugged her ears with wax and spent months studying at a school for the deaf to star in Belinda. It was a risky decision, because Hollywood still preferred scripted dialogue and by-the-book performances.

She won the Oscar for Best Actress without speaking a single word in the entire film. That night in 1949 she became the first person since the silent film era to pull off such a feat. But her professional success coincided with the collapse of her marriage to Ronald Reagan, a second-tier actor who was becoming far too interested in union politics.

The Queen of Saturated Colors

Wyman never wanted to be the ex-wife of a politician. She preferred to be in charge of her own schedule. During the 1950s, she became the key figure in Douglas Sirk's melodramas. These were films with impossible colors and emotions pushed to the limit, and they are still studied in film schools everywhere.

In 1954 she shot Obsession, and a year later Only the Lonely. In these productions she played women who defied the social norms of the era, often falling for younger men or men from lower social classes. Because Wyman understood that drama lies not in the scream, but in restraint.

She was a working woman.

But the movie industry was changing, and she did not want to stay behind waiting for a call that would never come. Instead of lamenting the lack of roles for women of a certain age, she jumped to television with The Jane Wyman Show. She was one of the first movie stars to understand that the small wooden box would be the future of the business.

The Iron Vineyard in California

In the early 1980s, her name made headlines again for a very different reason. Her former husband moved into the White House, but she refused to take part in the media circus. She never gave an interview about her private life with the president and chose to focus on a new project that would make her enormously rich.

That project was called Falcon Crest. In 1981, she accepted the role of Angela Channing, a relentless matriarch who ran her vineyards with an iron fist. Wyman reportedly controlled every detail of the shoot, from the scripts to her co-stars' wardrobe.

She filmed 227 episodes of the series and became the best-paid actress on American television for almost a decade. But the pace of work was brutal, and her health began to suffer from diabetes. In 1990, she decided that was enough and retired from public life for good.

She died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Rancho Mirage on September 10, 2007, at the age of 90.