Iconic TV Mom Jane Wyatt Dies

Jane Wyatt was a mother. On screen, off screen. On this planet, off this planet.

Wyatt, who tended to suburbia's Andersons on Father Knows Best and nurtured Vulcan's Mr. Spock in Star Trek, died Friday in her sleep at her Bel-Air, California, home, her publicist and goddaughter Meg McDonald confirmed Monday.

Wyatt was 96.

Billy Gray, who played the actress' TV son, Bud, on Father Knows Best remembered Wyatt on Monday as a "wonderful lady." "One of the few people I worked with who I kept in touch with," Gray said.

Gray said he last saw Wyatt about two months ago; the two had tea.

"She was frail, but still bright as a tack, to mix a metaphor," Gray said.

Wyatt won three Emmys, from 1958 to 1960, for her portrayal of Margaret Anderson on Father Knows Best. Beyond the awards, the role won Wyatt a new generation of fans, baby boomers who grew up with, and often judged their own families against, the series.

Viewers' identification with the Andersons—father Jim (Robert Young), mother Margaret, elder daughter Betty (Elinor Donahue), middle child Bud and younger daughter Kitten (Lauren Chapin)—was so strong, some believed they were real family, à la the Nelsons of Ozzie & Harriett.

But the Andersons weren't a real family. And the situations confronted in the situation comedy, based in generic Springfield, Any State, U.S.A., weren't exactly gritty. Sample episode: "Margaret Hires a Gardener."

If on screen, Wyatt appeared to be an uncomplicated stay-at-home mother, then off screen, Wyatt was a working mother of two who came to TV only after the McCarthy Era blacklist ended her film career.

Prior to 1950, Wyatt worked exclusively in movies. Her big-screen credits included Gentleman's Agreement (1947) with Gregory Peck and the utopian vision of director Frank Capra's Lost Horizon (1937).

But after Senator Joseph McCarthy's Communist-hunting hearings put the Red Scare into Hollywood, Wyatt's film offers dried up. According to her official biography, the actress was considered tainted, in part, for having hosted a performance by Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet in the 1940s. Apparently it didn't matter that President Roosevelt had asked Wyatt to do the hosting.

Post-McCarthy Era, television became Wyatt's primary source of employment.

On Father Knows Best, Wyatt worried whether she was doing justice to Mrs. Anderson.

"She was concerned that she didn't have it right," Gray remembered.

What both Wyatt and Young had right, according to Gray, were their roles on the set.

"Neither Robert or Jane presumed to be our real parents in real life," said Gray, who was 16 when the show began. "We all treated it as an acting job...[The show] was tackled as a cast, and everybody was dedicated to doing the best job we could." Father Knows Best produced 203 episodes from 1954 through 1960. Though never a Top 10 hit, the show was such a reliable, popular performer that CBS and, later, ABC ran its reruns in prime time until the spring of 1963.

The Father Knows Best company reunited in 1977 for a pair of reunion TV movies, The Father Knows Best Reunion and Father Knows Best: Home for Christmas.

Young, who was instrumental in converting Father Knows Best from a radio show into a TV show, died in 1998.

After Father Knows Best, Wyatt was a prolific TV guest star, and, in at least one case, an iconic TV guest star.

In 1967, Wyatt appeared in a Star Trek episode, "Journey to Babel," as the emotion-equipped maternal unit of the Enterprise's half-human, half-Vulcan first officer. And though Wyatt would play the role of Amanda only once more, in 1986's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, to the Trek faithful, she was forever Spock's mom.

Born August 12, 1910, in Campgaw, New Jersey, Wyatt began her professional acting career at age 19 on the New York stage. She married her first and only husband, Edgar Ward, in 1937. They remained married until his death in 2000.