Ronald Bergan writes: By far the best role Nancy Reagan ever had was as US first lady. However, as Nancy Davis, her acting career was by no means ignominious. She appeared in several reasonably good movies and TV shows. Unfortunately, the only leading parts she was given by MGM, who had signed her to a five-year contract in 1948, were in the studio’s B features, mostly as devoted housewives.
Having taken a degree in drama at Smith College in Massachusetts, Davis managed to get a role in a touring company production of the play Ramshackle Inn, starring ZaSu Pitts, a friend of her family. After the two-month run ended in New York in December 1944, she decided to stay on in order to fulfil her theatrical ambitions. It took a year of failed auditions, and some modelling work, before she landed the role of a Chinese lady-in-waiting to Mary Martin in the Broadway musical Lute Song.
Her screen debut came in William Dieterle’s romantic fantasy Portrait of Jennie (1948), where she is seen at the end of the movie, with Nancy Olson and Anne Francis, standing in awe in front of the eponymous painting. The following year, she played the wife of an ambitious paediatrician in The Doctor and The Girl; and Barbara Stanwyck’s confidante in East Side, West Side.
Shadow on the Wall (1950) gave Davis her first substantial part, as a cool-headed child psychiatrist, trying to get the truth of a murder witnessed by a young girl. The title of William Wellman’s The Next Voice You Hear … (1950) refers to a mysterious voice on the radio claiming to be God that Davis as the pregnant Mary Smith and her blue-collar worker husband Joe (James Whitmore) hear every night. The film was a comforting exploration of faith, in which Davis, according to the New York Times, “was delightful as the gentle, plain and understanding wife”.
In Night into Morning (1951), she is once more in a sympathetic role as a widowed teacher who helps to console her colleague Ray Milland after his wife and child are killed in an accident. In the episodic It’s a Big Country (1951), Davis is seen again as a teacher, who recommends that one of her pupils needs spectacles, against the wishes of the boy’s stubborn macho father.
Talk About a Stranger (1952), an effective liberal parable, saw Davis reprising the role of a pregnant mother, this time of a boy whose dog has been poisoned, and who blames a foreigner. Her husband was played by George Murphy, who became a Republican senator, and to whom Ronald Reaganonce referred as “my John the Baptist”. Nancy then wound up her MGM contract in Shadow in the Sky (1952) as (what else?) a loving housewife and mother who has to cope with the shell-shocked best friend (Ralph Meeker) of her husband (Whitmore again).
Though by now she had married Ronald Reagan, she continued to act, mainly concentrating on television, and appearing with her husband in episodes of the Ford Television Theatre and General Electric Theater series. In addition, she made three further movies. In Donovan’s Brain (1953), she was the lab assistant and loyal wife of a scientist (Lew Ayres) who has managed to keep a dead man’s brain alive. When she questions his experiments on a monkey, and he explains the reasons why, she replies: “You’re right, darling, I’m being silly.” “Thanks, dear,” he says. “Now will you go and make us one of those wonderful stews.”
The only feature film the Reagans appeared in together was a minor war film, Hellcats of the Navy (1957), he as a submarine commander, she as a nurse. In her final movie, Crash Landing (1958), she is seen in flashback as the wife of a pilot in trouble (Gary Merrill), not really the sort of role to inspire her to continue in the acting profession.
• Nancy (Anne Frances) Reagan, actor and former US first lady, born 6 July 1921; died 6 March 2016.
