Background and career
Jane Waddington Wyatt ( WY-ət; August 12, 1910 – October 20, 2006) was an American actress. She starred in a number of Hollywood films, such as Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, but is likely best known for her role as homemaker and mother Margaret Anderson on the CBS and NBC television comedy series Father Knows Best, and as Amanda Grayson, the human mother of Spock on the science-fiction television series Star Trek. Wyatt was a three-time Emmy Award–winner.
Wyatt was born on August 12, 1910, in Campgaw, a neighborhood in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey, and raised in Manhattan. Her father, Christopher Billopp Wyatt, was a broker. Her mother was Euphemia Van Rensselaer Waddington, granddaughter of Henry Bell Van Rensselaer. Wyatt had two sisters and a brother.
While in New York City, Wyatt attended Miss Chapin's School, where she had roles as Joan of Arc and as Shylock. She later attended two years of Barnard College. After leaving Barnard, she joined the apprentice school of the Berkshire Playhouse at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where for six months she played a variety 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 listing in the New York Social Register (she later was relisted upon her marriage). Receiving favorable notices on Broadway and celebrated for her understated beauty, Wyatt made the transition from stage to screen and was placed under contract by Universal Pictures. She made her film debut in 1934 in One More River. Inarguably her most famous film role, she co-starred as Ronald Colman's character's love interest in Frank Capra's Columbia Pictures film Lost Horizon (1937). She reflected on Lost Horizon sixty years later in St. Anthony Messenger magazine:
During the war, they cut out all the pacifist parts of the film—the High Lama talking about peace in the world. All that was cut because they were trying to inspire those G.I.'s to get out there and go "bang! bang! bang!" which sort of ruined the film.
In 1939 Wyatt had not yet achieved her greatest fame when she appeared at Denver's legendary Elitch Theatre as the leading lady for the summer stock season, opposite Donald Woods. Her next film appearances included Gentleman's Agreement with Gregory Peck, None but the Lonely Heart with Cary Grant, Boomerang with Dana Andrews, and Our Very Own with Farley Granger. Wyatt co-starred in the crime dramas Pitfall and House by the River, and with Randolph Scott in a Western, Canadian Pacific. She played the wife of Gary Cooper in the war story Task Force. Her film career suffered due to her outspoken opposition to Senator Joseph McCarthy, the chief figure in the anti-Communist investigations of that era, and was temporarily derailed for having assisted in hosting a performance by the Bolshoi Ballet during the Second World War, though it was at the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wyatt returned to her roots on the New York stage for a time and appeared in such plays as Lillian Hellman's The Autumn Garden, opposite Fredric March.
