Jane Wyatt

  A sophisticated society gal who was dropped from New York's Social Register when she became an actress, Wyatt played a succession of loyal and loving lady friends, wives, mothers and finally, grandmas. After getting her start in regional theater, the handsome player graduated to Broadway and by the mid-'30s she was landing film roles. She gave one of her most memorable movie performances early on, as a luminous love interest in the 1937 fantasy Lost Horizon. During the '40s Wyatt appeared in films of varying quality, from classics like the anti-Semitism saga Gentleman's Agreement to now-forgotten Westerns like The Kansan. But in the '50s her film career stalled, not because of her age but because of her politics: her outspoken opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist House Un-American Activities Committee landed her on Hollywood's blacklist. Yet she found work — and her greatest success — in a new medium: television. In addition to numerous performances in the live dramas of the day, she snagged her signature role and three Emmys as a patient wife and mother on the beloved sitcom Father Knows Best. After the series folded, Wyatt kept busy on the small screen, notably playing Mr. Spock's human mother on the original Star Trek as well as in the film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. She also appeared in a recurring part as a hospital administrator's wife on St. Elsewhere, and reprised her signature role for the 1977 TV-movie Father Knows Best: Home for Christmas. When Wyatt died in 2006, she hadn't been active in entertainment for more than a decade, but her embodiment of the perfect Midwestern mother lived on in reruns.