Jane Wyman won an Oscar without saying a single word on screen
For Johnny Belinda in 1948, Jane Wyman played a young deaf woman who never speaks, and prepared for more than six months. She became the first sound-era winner of the best actress Oscar with no dialogue at all, then joked at the podium that she might try keeping quiet again.
Born Sarah Jane Mayfield in St. Joseph, Missouri, on January 5, 1917, she had a fractured childhood. Her mother divorced in 1921, moved to Cleveland and left her with a local couple, Emma and Richard Fulks, whose surname she used informally although they never adopted her. Her father died of pneumonia months later. She described her upbringing as so strict that it took years to shake off the resentment.
Dance was the way out. She had taken lessons at the Prinz academy in St. Joseph, and the owner's son, LeRoy Prinz, was by then a dance director at Paramount, where he coached her for chorus work. Her first screen appearance was as an uncredited chorus girl in The Kid from Spain (1932). Along the way she worked as a manicurist and switchboard operator, and married a salesman, Ernest Wyman, at 16 while claiming to be 19. The marriage lasted two years, but his surname stayed with her for the rest of her career.
Warner Bros. signed her in 1936 and kept her for two decades, largely in B pictures and supporting parts. One oddity: in You're in the Army Now (1941) she and Regis Toomey shared a screen kiss of 3 minutes and 5 seconds, the longest in cinema history. On Brother Rat (1938) she worked with Ronald Reagan, the future president who became her first famous husband.
The Lost Weekend (1945) finally won critics over; Billy Wilder had wanted a bigger name, but his partner Charles Brackett pushed for her. Four best actress nominations came between 1946 and 1954, including for Magnificent Obsession opposite Rock Hudson. In 1955 she moved into television with her own production company, and decades later a second peak arrived as the scheming matriarch Angela Channing in Falcon Crest (1981–1990). She died in 2007, aged 90.
Source: Jane Wyman
