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LOS ANGELES----Jane Wyatt, one of television's most beloved sitcom mothers, died Friday in her sleep of natural causes at her Bel-Air home. She was 96.Despite an acting career on stage and in film dating back to the 1930s, Wyatt will forever be a legend as Margaret Anderson, the matriarch of the family on television's Father Knows Best from 1954 to 1960.
She won the role as Robert Young's wife when the series moved from radio to CBS. The series was canceled after dismal ratings in a bizarre Sunday-at-10 time slot as What's My Line?'s lead-in during the 1954-55 season.
In a rare instance of viewer mail overturning network programmers, Scott Paper Company picked up the series and moved it to NBC between 1955 and 1958. Father Knows Best moved back to CBS for its final two seasons and continued in prime time reruns on CBS and ABC through 1963. ABC continued daytime repeats until 1966.
Wyatt racked up three consecutive Emmys as Best Actress in a Comedy Series from 1958-60. She never did another series but continued as a frequent guest performer and periodically turned up on network game shows into the 1980s.
Her most noted appearance was in 1966 when she reunited with Young for a week on Password. Allen Ludden interwove conversations about Father Knows Best, although he mistakenly remembered Young's character of Jim Anderson as a lawyer. Young corrected him, reminding viewers Anderson was an insurance agent.
More contemporary viewers recall the semi-retired Wyatt returning for a week of Super Password in 1987. She joined TV children Elinor Donahue, Billy Gray and Lauren Chapin for five days of shows for charity games. Wyatt had a notable hearing problem during the tapings and her former co-stars helped her through the difficult spots.
Among the other game shows on her resume: 20 Questions (1951), Where Was I? (1952), What's My Line? (1958, mystery guest), Take a Good Look (1960), Password (1963 vs. Richard Boone), The Match Game (1963), The Price is Right (1964), Oh My Word! (1966), You Don't Say! (1967) and Personality (1967).
The Associated Press report on Wyatt's death recalled an interview she gave in 1966. Increasingly, critics from the mid-1960s to the present day decried Father Knows Best and its fellow family sitcoms as inaccurate, exaggerated portrayals of ideal family life.
"We tried to preserve the tradition that every show had something to say," Wyatt said in the interview 40 years ago. "The children were complicated personally, not just kids. We weren't just five Pollyannas."
Father Knows Best did not end because of ratings woes. The final season (1959-60) scored the series' top ratings, finishing sixth for the year in CBS's strong Monday night comedy block of Father, The Danny Thomas Show and The Ann Sothern Show.
After six years, Chapin was 15, Gray 19 and Donahue 23 and Young, who had played the role on radio for five years before the move to TV and co-owned the series, tired of it. So did Wyatt. In an interview, she once said the sixth year was difficult because the actors all thought the 1958-59 season would be the finale. CBS, without a weekly Lucille Ball series and losing December Bride, wanted another year at a sharp increase in price.
Donahue went immediately into The Andy Griffith Show and Gray and Chapin---who both had celebrated bouts with drugs---disappeared from television. Wyatt retired from series starring roles. Young took a year off before returning in the unsuccessful Window on Main Street.
When he came out of retirement to star in the smash hit Marcus Welby, M.D., Young coaxed Wyatt back for a guest role in 1974 in an episode entitled "Designs."
In 1977, a year after Welby ended, Young had an idea for a special re-creating the Anderson family with the empty nest as the theme. NBC bought the concept and aired "The Father Knows Best Reunion" as a taped TV-movie in May 1977. Wyatt and the original cast were all returned. The show was the network's highest-rated special of the 1976-77 season. A sequel, "Father Knows Best: Home for Christmas," followed in December.
In 1986, when reruns of Father Knows Best moved from TBS to CBN (The Family Channel), Wyatt and her TV children (with Young inexplicably in a different studio) reunited again for Father Still Knows Best, a prime-time two-hour special in which the cast recalled series memories sandwiched around selected reruns.
TV Land now has the rights to the series but, aside from an occasional Sunday morning drop-in, rarely shows the episodes. Some online distributors offer bootleg copies of the entire series but none are authorized versions.
Wyatt's second most-noted role was as Amanda, mother of Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) in a mid-1960s episode of Star Trek---a role she re-created in the film "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home."
Born Jane Waddington Wyatt in Campgaw, N.J., in 1910, the future actress was educated at Barnard College before she left to study acting at the Berkshire Playhouse in Massachusetts. She was appearing with Lillian Gish on Broadway in 1934 when she earned her first film contract offer from Universal.
Wyatt was married to businessman Edgar Ward for 65 years. Ward died in 2000. She is survived by sons Christopher and Michael, three grandchildren and five great grandchildren.
The family will hold a funeral mass Friday, followed by a private burial.
Transition: Mike Douglas
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