By Frank Worth

Jane Wyman flanked by William Holden and Cary Grant at a formal dinner.

Jane Wyman (born Sarah Jane Fulks in1917) is an Academy Award-winning, Golden Globe-winning and Emmy-nominated American actress also known for being the first wife of President Ronald Reagan.

Her first starring role was in Torchy Plays With Dynamite. She finally gained critical notice in the film noir The Lost Weekend (1945). She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1946 for The Yearling (1946), and won an Academy Award in 1948 for her role as the deaf-mute rape victim in Johnny Belinda (1948). She was the first Oscar winner to earn the award without speaking a line of dialogue.

Other films include Stage Fright (1950), Here Comes the Groom (1951), The Story of Will Rogers (1952). She starred in The Glass Menagerie (1950), Just for You (1952), Let's Do It Again (1953), The Blue Veil (1951) (another Oscar nomination), So Big (1953), Magnificent Obsession (1954) (Oscar nomination), Lucy Gallant (1955), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Miracle in the Rain (1956), Holiday for Lovers (1959), Pollyanna (1960), Bon Voyage! (1962), and her final big screen movie was How to Commit Marriage (1969).

For her role as Angela Channing in the highly successful television serial Falcon Crest, Jane Wyman was nominated for a Soap Opera Digest Award five times (for Outstanding Actress in a Leading Role and for Outstanding Villainess: Prime Time Serial), and was also nominated for a Golden Globe award in 1983 and 1984. That same year, she won the Golden Globe for Best Performance By an Actress in a TV Series.

Jane Wyman has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; one for motion pictures at 6607 Hollywood Boulevard and one for television at 1620 Vine Street.

Born William Franklin Beedle Jr., William Holden (1918-1981) was an Academy Award-winning American film actor. He received an Academy Award as Best Actor in Stalag 17 in 1953 and an Emmy as Outstanding Lead Actor in The Blue Knight in 1974.

Other films include Executive Suite (1954), The Country Girl (1954), Picnic (1955), Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Key (1958),The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), The Moon is Blue (1953), Born Yesterday (1950), Forever Female (1953), Sabrina (1954) and The World of Suzie Wong. He also starred in The Wild Bunch, The Towering Inferno, Network and, in 1980, The Earthling.

He was named one of the Top 10 Stars of the Year six times (1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1961) and appeared on the American Film Institute's AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars list as No 25.

Cary Grant (1904-1986), born Archibald Alec Leach, was an English film actor. With his distinctive Mid-Atlantic accent he was the ultimate, debonair leading man, handsome, witty and charming.

After success on Broadway, he came to Hollywood in 1931 and assumed the name of Cary Grant. He made over 80 films, starring in a number of comedies including The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, His Girl Friday and Arsenic and Old Lace. Perhaps his best known screen role as a charming, unreliable but irresistible man was in The Philadelphia Story.

Cary Grant was a favourite actor of Alfred Hitchcock, notorious for disliking actors, who said that Grant was ‘the only actor I ever loved in my whole life’. He appeared in such Hitchcock classics as Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest.

In the mid-1950s, Grant formed his own production company, Grantley Productions, and produced a number of movies distributed by Universal, such as Operation Petticoat, Indiscreet, That Touch of Mink (co-starring Doris Day), and Father Goose.

While Grant was nominated for two Academy Awards in the 1940s, he was denied an Oscar throughout his active career as he was considered a maverick by virtue of the fact that he was the first actor to ‘go independent’, effectively bucking the old studio system which pretty much completely controlled what an actor could or could not do. Cary Grant finally received a special Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1970.