Jane Wyatt spent half a century being the sensible, kind woman a story could lean on and seldom looked at, from Capra's Shangri-La to Spock's mother. She did it well enough that the parts eventually stopped asking her for anything else.
Fi1m perspective
In Lost Horizon (1937) she stands in a valley with pigeons wheeling overhead, flutes tied to their legs, and smiles at Ronald Colman. That is more or less the part. Sondra Bizet exists to make paradise look attractive, and Wyatt makes it look attractive; Frank Capra gives her little else to do and she does not force it. We found, on watching it again, that the smile stayed with us longer than most of the High Lama's speeches, which is not nothing in a film that has so many of them. It is a calm, unbothered piece of acting in a picture that is otherwise very busy telling you what it means.
She had come from Broadway, made her film debut in One More River (1934), and the Capra film was the one that got her noticed. The 1940s gave her supporting parts in serious pictures: Gentleman's Agreement (1947), Elia Kazan's drama about antisemitism, and Pitfall (1948), a film noir about a marriage and an infidelity, in which she is the wife, Sue Forbes. We have not reviewed them and will not judge them here, but the pattern is plain from the casting. She was the decent one, the steady one, the woman the men in the story are measured against.
Television made the pattern permanent. As Margaret Anderson in Father Knows Best (1954–1960), opposite Robert Young, she became the ideal suburban mother of the decade, and the part followed her about for the rest of her working life. She felt the typecasting, and said so, though she also defended the woman she had played: "She was the power behind the throne. She helped her husband out. Mother always knew best, too." What she had, and what the wholesome parts drew on until it ran thin, was a way of playing goodness as a settled fact rather than a virtue being announced. Nothing in the voice asks for credit.
The oddest and most durable of the late parts is Amanda Grayson, Spock's human mother, first in Star Trek (1967) and again in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). Our review of the film did not single her out, and the film does not either; it is about the company, and she is part of the company. But the casting tells you what the part needed. Somebody had to be believed, without argument, as the human half of the most famous half-human on television, and the producers reached for the woman America had already accepted as its mother.
If you want to see what she could do when a script gave her something to want, the 1940s films are the place to look, and our not having reviewed them is an omission. Most people will start where she did, with the smile in the valley. It is a good one.
Biography
Jane Wyatt (also credited as Jane Waddington Wyatt) was an American actress. She played Amanda Grayson, the human mother of Spock, in the 1967 Star Trek episode "Journey to Babel" and reprised the role in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
Wyatt is also known for her role as Margaret Anderson in the television series Father Knows Best (1954–1960), for which she won three consecutive Emmy Awards, and as Sondra in the 1937 film Lost Horizon. Her other film credits include Gentleman's Agreement (1947) and House by the River (1950). She began her career on the New York stage and made her film debut in One More River (1934).
Born on 12 August 1910 in Campgaw, New Jersey, Wyatt died on 20 October 2006 in Los Angeles.
