Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.

It’s been a deranged week in terms of work to get done, but one obligation has nagged at me for the last few days, and I feel awful about it. Jane Wyman, who won the Best Actress Academy Award in 1948 for her remarkable work in JOHNNY BELINDA, passed away on Monday at the age of 90, and I would be remiss if I did not offer our condolences to her friends and family.

For my generation, Wyman was probably best known for her role on FALCON CREST in the ‘80s, where she was the anchor for the family soap opera, the J.R. Ewing of the series. She was also infamous as the first wife of Ronald Reagan. But as a fan of movies from the classic studio era, I’ve become quite familiar with Wyman’s presence, and I am confident that she left behind a body of work that will endure.

JOHNNY BELINDA was pretty stark stuff when it was made, the story of a deaf-mute woman who is raped and impregnated, leading to a scandal that tears a small town apart. Seen today, it’s very discrete, carefully handled, but Wyman’s performance still packs just as big a punch. She may not be able to speak, but she conveys volumes with body language and with her eyes, and she spends much of the film in a delicate duet with Lew Ayres, playing the doctor whose attempts to connect her to the world by teaching her sign-language lead to the tragedy.

Ben Hecht was one of the great studio-era Hollywood screenwriters, and a wonderfully caustic wit, but he was able to set aside his cynical nature when writing, and his script for MIRACLE IN THE RAIN is wrenchingly emotional. This might be my favorite of Wyman’s films, a shameless weepie about a woman and a soldier and the plans they make before WWII. She spends much of the movie longing for the return of Van Johnson, and it’s her work that really flattens me when I watch it. This one was released by Warner Bros. this year on Valentine’s Day as part of a special DVD promotion, and it’s well worth seeing if you haven’t.

She worked with directors like Alfred Hitchcock (STAGE FRIGHT) and Douglas Sirk (ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS), and she played some classic roles like Laura in THE GLASS MENAGERIE. She was nominated for a total of four Academy Awards during her career, as well as Golden Globes and Emmys, and she held the record for longest screen kiss ever (over 3 minutes in YOU’RE IN THE ARMY NOW) until Andy Warhol decided to make an hour-long film called, appropriately, KISS.

She and Reagan were married when they were both under contract at Warner Bros. He was actually her second husband, and the year she won her Oscar, they divorced. She was always quietly supportive of Reagan even after the divorce, and she never spoke poorly of him during any of his runs for office. She conducted her personal life with a class and a dignity that many modern stars would do well to emulate.

Still, it is her body of film work that she will be most remembered for, and if you’re not familiar with her work, I’d suggest you go track down THE YEARLING or THE LOST WEEKEND or HERE COMES THE GROOM this weekend. And if you love melodrama, there’s a big chunk of her career that will feel like paradise for you, since that seems to be what she did best. She worked with Sirk several times, and their collaboration on MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION is one of the films that got her an Oscar nomination. A pioneer in television, she hosted a weekly series called FIRESIDE THEATER that was eventually retitled THE JANE WYMAN THEATER to reflect her popularity with audiences.

Here’s hoping that popularity endures as people continue to rediscover her work in the future. They don’t make them like Jane Wyman anymore, and our entire industry is poorer for it.

Drew McWeeny, Los Angeles