Jane Wyatt
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Jane Waddington Wyatt (born August 12, 1911 in Campgaw, New Jersey) is 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 sitcom Father Knows Best; and as Amanda Grayson, Mr. Spock's mother in Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Wyatt came from a New York family of social distinction (her father was a Wall Street investment banker and her mother was a drama critic). Jane 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 slot on the New York Social Register. Wyatt made the transitionfrom stage to screen and was placed under contract at Unversal and Broadway (and co-starred in Frank Capra's Columbia film Lost Horizon on a loan from Universal).
In the 1950s, she co-starred with Robert Young in Father Knows Best, the classic TV sitcom chronicling the life and times of the Anderson family in the Midwestern town of Springfield.
External links
- IMDB site for Jane Wyatt (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0943553)
- The Amanda Grayson Tribute Page (http://www20.brinkster.com/starrysky/amanda/index.html)