By Lucie M. Winborne
In 1937, he signed a seven-year contract with Warner Bros. and went on to make more than 50 movies over the next three decades. Two of his standout roles were that of Notre Dame football hero George Gipp in 1940’s Knute Rockne All American, and a devastated double-amputee in 1942’s Kings Row (his personal favorite). Reagan was summoned to active duty with the Army Air Force two months after the film’s release, but his poor eyesight marked him for limited service, which included making training films. His final work as a professional actor was on TV’s Death Valley Days.
Reagan’s first marriage, to actress Jane Wyman, with whom he had a daughter and adopted a son, ended in divorce after eight years and left him skeptical about matrimony, but when he met actress Nancy Davis at the Sunset Strip restaurant La Rue, the spark was apparent and immediate. They wed in 1952 and had two children.
In his first race for public office, for the governorship of California, Reagan defeated Edmund “Pat” Brown Sr. by nearly a million votes. He won a second term in 1970, but it took him another decade to make it to the White House, becoming at 69 the oldest elected president in U.S. history. Two months later, he survived an assassination attempt, famously quipping to Nancy that he “forgot to duck.” Numbered among his most praised achievements are the tax cuts of 1981, nuclear-arms reduction and easing of Cold War tensions, balanced by failures such as the scandal of the Iran-Contra affair and the ultimately abortive nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, he ended his eight-year term with the highest approval rating of a U.S. president leaving office since his hero, FDR.
Nearly six years later, Reagan revealed that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, memorably stating that he was now beginning “the journey that will lead me into the sunset of my life.” That sunset faded into black on June 5, 2004. Reagan was 93.
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