Jane Dewey

Biography

American actress, mainly in small roles. A native of Greenfield, Massachusetts, Dewey attended Smith College as a theatre student. While in college, she married New York theatre and museum director Patric Farrell, who directed the Irish Theatre at Sheridan Square. Together they had a daughter, Patricia, who later developed myasthenia gravis, leading Dewey, then long-remarried, to found the Myasthenia Gravis Foundation. The marriage to Farrell was brief and Dewey embarked on a stage career. She appeared in one Broadway flop, "Be So Kindly," in 1937, then was given a contract by Paramount Pictures. She played the wife of Robert Cummings in her first film, Wells Fargo (1937), but her roles quickly diminished in size. In her last film, she played Mrs. Farrell (coincidentally her own married name), the wife of Alan Ladd, in Rulers of the Sea (1939). But by that time, she had remarried, to comic book editor Whitney Ellsworth. She left Hollywood presumably for good and settled with her daughter and new husband in Connecticut. In 1951, her husband took on the duties of producing Adventures of Superman (1952) and the family moved back to Los Angeles. Dewey devoted the rest of her life to her work with the Myasthenia Gravis Foundation. Widowed in 1980, Jane Dewey Ellsworth died August 30, 1991, from emphysema.