The Hollywood Movie Star who became First Lady: Nancy Reagan’s Film Career

The broadcast of the annual Academy Awards for Motion Pictures this coming Sunday, March 2, 2014, offers an opportunity to consider an often neglected period in the career of one of history’s most important First Ladies, Nancy Reagan.

Born far from the glamorous hills of Hollywood with which she would come to be so closely associated in the working-class neighborhood of Flushing, Queens in New York City, this First Lady’s legals born as Anne Frances Robbins on July 5, 1921.

Nancy Reagan might well have been born in a theatrical trunk, however, given the nature of her mother’s active professional life as a theatrical actress.

Following her separation from Nancy’s birth father Kenneth Robbins, Edith Luckett returned to the theatrical profession which had gainfully employed many of her own family in the late 19^th century in the Washington, D.C. area.

Edie counted many friends who went on to become legendary movie actors like Katherine Hepburn and Claudette Colbert, who then took her daughter under their wings. Even Nancy Reagan’s godmother was the famously exotic actress Alla Nazimova.

Since Edie’s work meant she was not just in New York for a show’s run but often traveling the nation as part of touring companies, Nancy Reagan matured into adolescence in the care of her maternal aunt in Bethesda, Maryland.

While living apart from her mother created anxiety, being so close to Washington permitted the future First Lady to at least attend the annual Easter Egg Roll contest on the White House lawn during the years that Grace Coolidge hosted the event.

Following Edith’s 1928 divorce from Ken Robbins, marriage a year later to Chicago neurosurgeon Loyal Davis and his 1935 adoption of her daughter, Nancy Davis enrolled at the Girls Latin School in the Windy City. There she performed in many of the school plays, including one called First Lady.

Upon graduation, Nancy Davis went on to attend Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts. While at Smith, Nancy Davis continued her interest in acting, involving herself in the school’s theatrical productions, including a World War II show called The Factory Follies, which referenced the famous Rosie the Riveters of the era.

She graduated with her bachelor’s degree in dramatic arts.

The future First Lady was still in college, however, when she made her very first appearance on film, performing in a National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis fundraising short film short shown across the nation’s movie theaters.

In the short, Nancy Davis played a volunteer in the fight against polio, a public service effort with incumbent First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt then serving as an honorary chair of the organization which her husband had helped foster.

In 11945, two years after graduating from Smith College, Nancy Davis followed her mother’s footsteps in the limelight, cast in a small role in the touring company of Ramshackle Inn, starring Edith Davis’s friend, the legendary actress Zasu Pitts.

A year later, she won a role in the Broadway musical Lute Song, which starred Mary Martin and Yul Brynner.

With many theatrical works being filmed for the earliest television show series in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Nancy Davis appeared in another production of Ramshackle Inn for television broadcast, as well as one called Broken Dishes.

It was that latter TV appearance which led to her being flown out to the state she would always love as her home, California, bidden there to make a screen test for Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios.

Mrs. Davis told her friend Spencer Tracey about the exciting prospect and he then phoned legendary director George Cukor who, along with Howard Keel, worked with Nancy Davis in producing a screen test which resulted in a contract.

“Joining Metro,” said Nancy Reagan, “was like walking into a dream world.” On her first day at the MGM studios, she admitted to being “nervous and gullible.”

The new starlet was struck, recalling how she would report to work some mornings only to find she was seated in the makeup room beside stars such as Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner.

In the MGM lunchroom, she ate alongside the likes of big-name stars such as Fred Astaire, Lana Turner, Frank Sinatra, Deborah Kerr, Gene Kelly, and Esther Williams.

Usually typecast as a youthful mother, she auditioned for many other roles in competition with leading stars of the era. With unnerving frequency, however, Debbie Reynolds got the part.

“I was beside myself with excitement. Not only was Metro the greatest studio in Hollywood,” she wrote, “but I was finally earning a regular paycheck…”

Over the years, Nancy Reagan would make a total of eleven feature films, appearing with bold-faced names such as Barbara Stanwyck, Van Heflin, Ray Milland, Ann Sothern, James Whitmore, Cyd Charisse, and Glenn Ford.

During her first year on contract, her first two film roles The Doctor and the Girl and East Side, West Side were as a supporting cast member.

A year later, in 1950, she was cast in two films which won her good reviews.

The New York Times called her Shadow on the Wall depiction of a child psychiatrist “beautiful and convincing” and the newspaper declared her co-starring role as an expectant mother to whom God speaks through the radio in The Next Voice You Hear to be “delightful.”

Of all her movie roles, Mrs. Reagan’s own favorite was that of a fiancée whose intended husband dies, in the 1951 film Night into Morning.

Both the New York Times and Washington Post film critics detected authenticity in the emotions she conveyed on screen. The Times declared that she “knows the loneliness of grief,” while the Post critiqued that she “is splendid as the understanding widow.”

It was not then publicly known that, in real life, Nancy Davis had been engaged to a young man during her college years who had, in fact, been killed in an accident which thus altered the course of her personal life.

“I loved the work, although it was a lot less glamorous than people think,” Mrs. Reagan later candidly reflected. She also addressed why she made the choices she did during her life at the time: “I was never really a career woman but only because I hadn’t found the man I wanted to marry. I couldn’t sit around and do nothing, so I became an actress.”

Even her initial 1949 press release upon signing with MGM had explicitly stated that a “successful happy marriage” had always been her personal priority.

Once working steadily as a professional actress, however, she had every hope she would eventually receive offers for a wider range of roles. “I think I could have gone on and made a good career for myself,” she later reflected. She was likely less compulsive about “making it big in pictures” than most of her peers at the time because within a year of arriving in Hollywood, she met the president of the Screen Actors Guild, fellow actor Ronald Reagan.

After they married in March 1952, the new Mrs. Reagan went on to serve on the Screen Actors Guild board of directors for a decade. Released from her MGM contract that year, she went on to make three more feature films at other studios, the first being a science fiction movie called Donovan’s Brain.

Her role as a nurse in the 1957 film Hellcats of the Navy is perhaps her most famous because her co-star was her husband.

While the script was panned, her performance was not, one critic noting that Mrs. Reagan “does well with what she has to work with.”

Before making her last motion picture, 1958’s Crash Landing, Nancy Reagan had already begun a second phase of her Hollywood career, guest-starring in a number of television theatrical dramas including four episodes of General Electric Theater, which her husband hosted.

In one of those GE Theater episodes Nancy Reagan’s co-star was Ronald Reagan. The name of it?  A Turkey for the President.

The year 1962 marked the last time Mrs. Reagan acted professionally on camera, doing episodes of four series that year, Wagon Train, 87^th Precinct, and The Dick Powell Theater.

Five years later she would be serving as the Golden State’s First Lady during Reagan’s two terms as governor and within twenty years, Nancy Reagan was First Lady of the United States from 1981 to 1989.

It was not the end of offers to star in a feature film, however.

Just seven years after she left the White House, director and actor Albert Brooks approached the former First Lady to consider starring as the lead in his 1996 movie Mother.

Nancy Reagan turned down the offer. And Debbie Reynolds got the part.

The Feature Film Roles of Nancy Davis Reagan

1949 The Doctor and the Girl as Mariette Esmond 

1949 East Side, West Side as Helen Lee

1950 Shadow on the Wall as Dr. Caroline Canford

1950 The Next Voice You Hear as Mary Smith

1951 Night Into Morning as Katherine Mead

1951 It’s a Big Country as Miss Coleman

1952 Talk About a Stranger as Marge Fontaine

1952 Shadow in the Sky as Betty Hopke

1953 Donovan’s Brain as Janice Cory

1957 Hellcats of the Navy as Helen Blair

1958 Crash Landing as Helen Williams

 

Television Series Roles of Nancy Davis Reagan

1948 Portrait of Jennie, (uncredited role as girl in art gallery)

1949 The Philco-Goodyear Television Playhouse

– Ramshackle Inn (1949)

–Broken Dishes (1949)

1953 The Ford Television Theatre
–The First Born (1953) as Laura Glenn

1953-1954 Schlitz Playhouse
– The Pearl Street Incident (1954) …[character name unknown]

– Twenty-two Sycamore Road (1953) as Nan Gage

1955 Climax!
– Bailout at 43,000 Feet as Carol Peterson

1961 Zane Grey Theater
– The Long Shadow as Amy Lawson

1961 The Tall Man
– Shadow of the Past as Sarah Wiley

1956-1961 General Electric Theater
– That’s the Man! (1956) as Evelyn Kent

– A Turkey for the President (1958) as Native-American Indian woman

– The Playoff (1960) as Betty Anderson

– Money and the Minister (1961) as Vicky Carlisle

1962 Wagon Train 
– The Sam Darland Story as Mrs. Baxter

1962 87th Precinct
– King’s Ransom as Diane King

1962 The Dick Powell Theatre
– Obituary for Mr. X as Flora Roberts