Jane Wyman, actress and ex-wife of Reagan

LOS ANGELES — Jane Wyman, the Academy Award-winning actress whose long and distinguished film and television career was nearly overshadowed by her real-life role as the first wife of actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan, died Monday. She gave her age as 90, but other biographical sources say she was 93.

Wyman died at her desert home in Rancho Mirage of age-related causes, said Virginia Zamboni, a longtime friend.

In a career spanning six decades and more than 80 films, Wyman earned Oscar nominations for "The Yearling" (1946), as the backwoods wife of Gregory Peck; "The Blue Veil" (1951), as a nursemaid viewed over many decades; and "Magnificent Obsession" (1954), as a blind woman romanced by a playboy (Rock Hudson) who accidentally killed her saintly husband.

Taken together with the Oscar-winning "Johnny Belinda" (1948), in which she played a deaf-mute rape victim, her role choices "established her as a stimulant to tears" for a generation of moviegoers, film scholar David Thomson once wrote.

Wyman had spent a decade unhappily appearing in light comedy parts before she saw "Johnny Belinda" as her path to dramatic success. To play her role, Wyman spent days with a young deaf-mute woman. Learning her gestures was not enough, Wyman said at the time.

"Even after weeks of [screen] tests ... something was missing," she said. "Suddenly I realized what was wrong. I could hear. I could act deaf but it lacked a realistic feeling and that showed in my face."

Director Jean Negulesco had the solution: to seal Wyman's ears with wax. Wyman also isolated herself from other cast members, saying it was a "terrifying time. The silence was new, frightening."

For the effort, she earned her only Oscar and became a top star after 15 years of struggle for better roles.

While making "Johnny Belinda," she ended her eight-year marriage to Reagan, then a B-list actor starting his political career in the Screen Actors Guild. Initially attracted to his modest and mild demeanor, Wyman said they grew apart as she focused more on her fast-moving career and he on his political interests.

In the 1950s, the early days of television, she staked out a career in that medium with her own half-hour dramatic anthology show. And years after her film career waned, she became familiar to millions more television viewers as the matriarch-you-love-to-hate in the long-running 1980s nighttime soap opera "Falcon Crest."

Still, hardly ever was Wyman's name mentioned in print without also referring to the second of her three husbands.

At the time they met in 1938, Reagan was a fellow actor under contract with Warner Bros. After a well-publicized courtship, they wed on Jan. 26, 1940.

Wyman bore the couple two daughters, one of whom died after a premature birth; the other, Maureen Reagan, died of melanoma in 2001 at 60. They also adopted their son Michael before divorcing in 1948.

Theirs would have been just another Hollywood marriage that landed on the rocks had Reagan not gone on to be governor of California and the 40th president of the United States.

Reagan, who by then was married to Nancy Davis and had two more children, was the first U.S. president to have been divorced. That bestowed on Wyman the dubious honor of being the first ex-wife of a U.S. president.

Much to Wyman's irritation, she was the subject of constant questioning about Reagan, despite her well-known refusal to speak of him because she considered it "bad taste to talk about ex-husbands and ex-wives."

She said she felt she had long proved herself as an actress and celebrity in her own right, and walked away from those who questioned her about subjects she considered off-limits.

Rarely did she break her silence about her former husband, with the exception of a brief statement issued after his death on June 5, 2004: "America has lost a great president and a great, kind and gentle man."

Wyman was married to businessman Myron Futterman in the 1930s. After her divorce from Reagan, she twice married musician and vocal coach Fred Karger, divorcing him the final time in 1965.

Survivors include her son, Michael Reagan, and three grandchildren.