Jane Wyatt, television icon and mother to Spock, died peacefully at her Bel-Air home in California last Friday. She was 96.

A stage, film and television star, Wyatt is best remembered as the supportive and iconic mother Margaret Anderson in Father Knows Best, alongside Robert Young. It was for this role that she won three Emmys in a row (1958-60). Star Trek fans will of course remember Wyatt as Spock's caring mother and Sarek's devoted wife Amanda in "Journey to Babel," a role she reprised in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home."

In her private life, Wyatt achieved another type of success. She married Edgar Bethune Ward, a businessman, in 1935 and they remained together for 65 years until his death in 2000. The couple had two sons, Christopher and Michael Ward.

Wyatt was born in 1910 in Campgaw, N.J. to a drama critic mother and Wall Street investor father. She studied at Barnard College and, following her acting impulses, left to study at Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, Mass. When she later signed a studio contract at Universal, her professional career was effectively launched.

In movies, Miss Jane Wyatt (as she was sometimes billed) hit high marks in Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon" and co-starring with Cary Grant in "None But the Lonely Heart." While enjoying her movie work, Wyatt preferred the stage. In order to fulfill this desire she had a clause in her studio contract that allowed her time off every year to return to Broadway.

Wyatt's political associations earned her a brief spell on the Hollywood blacklist in the early '50s. Prior to that, Wyatt was also castigated in some quarters for being anti-fascist before the United States entered World War II.

Wyatt is survived by her two sons (mentioned above), two grandsons, a granddaughter and seven great-grandchildren.

Services for Wyatt will be private. Donations in her memory can be directed to her long-standing charity the March of Dimes.