Nancy Reagan

Nancy Reagan

Early life

Anne Frances Robbins was born on July 6, 1921, at Manhattan’s Sloane Hospital for Women in New York, the only child of car salesman Kenneth Seymour Robbins (18941972) and his actress wife, Edith Luckett (18881987). Her godmother was silent-film-star Alla Nazimova. She lived for her first two years in Flushing, Queens, in New York. While her parents divorced soon after her birth, they had already been separated for some time. As her mother traveled the country to pursue acting jobs, Nancy was raised in Bethesda, Maryland, for the next six years by her aunt Virginia and uncle Audley Gailbraith. Nancy describes longing for her mother during those years: “My favorite times were when Mother had a job in New York, and Aunt Virgie would take me by train to stay with her.”

In 1929, her mother married Loyal Davis (18961982), a prominent, politically conservative neurosurgeon who moved the family to Chicago. Nancy and her stepfather got along very well; she would later write that he was “a man of great integrity who exemplified old-fashioned values”. He formally adopted her in 1935, and she would always refer to him as her father. At the time of the adoption, her name was legally changed to Nancy Davis (since birth, she had commonly been called Nancy). She attended the Girls’ Latin School of Chicago (describing herself as an average student), graduated in 1939, and later attended Smith College in Massachusetts, where she majored in English and drama and graduated in 1943.

Acting career

Nancy Davis poses for a publicity photo, 1950

Following her graduation, Davis held jobs in Chicago as a sales clerk in Marshall Field’s department store and as a nurse’s aide. With the help of her mother’s colleagues in theatre, including Zasu Pitts, Walter Huston, and Spencer Tracy, she pursued a career as a professional actress. She first gained a part in Pitts’ 1945 road tour of Ramshackle Inn, moving to New York City. She landed the role of Si-Tchun, a lady-in-waiting, in the 1946 Broadway musical about the Orient, Lute Song, starring Mary Martin and a pre-stardom Yul Brynner. The show’s producer told her, “You look like you could be Chinese.”

After passing a screen test, she moved to California and signed a seven-year contract with Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studios (MGM) in 1949; she later remarked, “Joining Metro was like walking into a dream world.” Davis appeared in 11 feature films, usually typecast as a “loyal housewife”, “responsible young mother”, or “the steady woman”. She kept her professional name as Nancy Davis even after marrying. Her film career began with minor roles in 1949’s The Doctor and the Girl with Glenn Ford, and followed with East Side, West Side starring Barbara Stanwyck. She played a child psychiatrist in the film noir Shadow on the Wall (1950) with Ann Sothern and Zachary Scott; her performance was called “beautiful and convincing” by New York Times critic A. H. Weiler. She co-starred in 1950’s The Next Voice You Hear…, playing a pregnant housewife who hears the voice of God from her radio. Influential reviewer Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that “Nancy Davis [is] delightful as [a] gentle, plain, and understanding wife.” A later critic admired the film’s effort to convincingly portray Davis as pregnantany other films from the time neglected to do so. In 1951, Davis appeared in her favorite screen role, Night Into Morning, a study of bereavement starring Ray Milland. Crowther said that Davis “does nicely as the fiance who is widowed herself and knows the loneliness of grief,” while another noted critic, The Washington Post’s Richard L. Coe, said Davis “is splendid as the understanding widow.” Davis left MGM in 1952, seeking a broader range of parts. She soon starred in the 1953 science fiction film Donovan’s Brain; Crowther said that Davis, playing the role of a possessed scientist’s “sadly baffled wife”, “walked through it all in stark confusion” in an “utterly silly” film. In her last movie, Hellcats of the Navy (1957), she played nurse Lieutenant Helen Blair and shared the screen for the only time with her husband, playing what one critic called “a housewife who came along for the ride”. Another reviewer, however, stated that Davis plays her part well, and “does well with what she has to work with”.

Noted author Garry Wills believes that Davis was underrated as an actress overall, because her constrained part in Hellcats was her most widely seen performance. In addition, Davis downplayed her Hollywood goals: MGM promotional material in 1949 said that her “greatest ambition” was to have a “successful happy marriage”; decades later, in 1975, she would say, “I was never really a career woman but [became one] 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.” Ronald Reagan biographer Lou Cannon nevertheless characterized

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