Jane Wyman

An Academy Award winner for "Johnny Belinda" (1948), Jane Wyman overcame a difficult childhood to become one of the most respected dramatic actresses of the late '40s and early '50s. She later received two Emmy nominations for her own television anthology series in the late Fifties, but went into semi-retirement until the early 1980s, when she was top-billed as the vicious matriarch Angela Channing in the popular primetime soap "Falcon Crest" (CBS, 1981-1990), which earned her a Golden Globe. Wyman was also noted for her marriage to future U.S. President Ronald Reagan from 1940-48 and during their time together as husband and wife, they were one of the most popular couples in Hollywood, with young fans soaking up all the information on their seemingly happy marriage in all the major movie magazines of the day. To her credit, even after he ex-husband and father of two of her children became first a California governor and then the leader of the free world, she opted to not speak publicly about Reagan for her own personal reasons, taking any details of their long-ago love story to her grave.