Donna Reed was twenty-four years old in January 1945, returning to Los Angeles from a personal trip to El Paso when a military officer boarded her plane and demanded her seat for an emergency flight. She gave it up without protest, assuming the matter was vital to the war effort, and went back to the terminal to arrange a hotel for the night. Early the next morning, the plane she was supposed to be on crashed into a fog-shrouded mountainside near Burbank. Everyone aboard was killed.

Reed was already reeling from the end of her first marriage, but the narrow escape changed something fundamental in her. A lifelong believer in God, she could not see it as coincidence. She had been spared, and she resolved to use her life more deliberately, a commitment that would eventually carry her from Iowa farm girl to Academy Award winner to one of the most visible anti-war voices in America. She had been born Donabel Mullinger on January 27, 1921, in a rural corner of Iowa, the eldest of three children of Hazel and Bill Mullinger, who farmed 120 acres in Nishnabotny Township.

The family lived much as their ancestors had, without electricity until the late 1930s, heating the house with a furnace fueled by corncobs and coal, and using an outdoor toilet that was brutal in the winter months. The Great Depression hit Iowa farms hard. The Mullingers lost entire harvests to grasshoppers, euthanized dairy cattle that failed tuberculosis tests, and slaughtered pigs stricken with cholera. Donna carried the memory of livestock crying for water and neighbors packing up their few possessions and simply leaving.

Despite the hardship, she excelled in school, graduating in the top ten of her class in 1938. She took a train to California, not a jalopy, and enrolled at Los Angeles City College, where she managed a punishing schedule of studies and work, sometimes exceeding eighteen hours a day, earning thirty-five cents an hour shelving books in the drama department library while scrubbing floors and cooking to make ends meet. In the fall of 1939 she was carrying fifteen and a half academic units while working thirty-eight hours a week. Returning home was not an option; the farm was two thousand miles away and her parents were counting on her.

In early 1941, a photograph of her from a beauty contest caught the attention of agent Bill Smith, who brought her to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Talent scout Billy Grady, impressed by her beauty and nervousness, arranged a rare screen test for a hopeful with no experience. In April 1941, just two years and seven months after leaving Iowa, she signed a four-year contract with MGM at seventy-five dollars a week. The studio changed her name without consulting her, and she disliked it, finding the sound cold and forbidding, but she accepted it without complaint.

Her early films were unremarkable. She appeared in The Getaway, Shadow of the Thin Man, and a string of B pictures, often cast as sweet and wholesome types. In 1943 she married makeup artist William Tuttle. They decided to delay starting a family until after the war, and when she became pregnant, they chose an abortion rather than risk her career, a decision Tuttle later remembered as clear-cut but emotionally costly.

The marriage was over by January 1945, when she finalized the divorce citing irreconcilable differences. Her brush with death on the El Paso flight came the day after the divorce was final. In the aftermath, she began to ask why she had been chosen to survive. Her career took a significant turn later that year when director Frank Capra cast her as Mary Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life, opposite James Stewart.

Both Jean Arthur and Ginger Rogers had been rejected as colorless, but Capra saw in Reed something different, a mature, enduring femininity. The shoot was grueling. Capra pushed her hard, exploiting her perfectionism to the point of exhaustion. In 1946, at twenty-five, she played Mary across ages eighteen to forty, singing, dancing, and swimming, skills she had never mastered.

The atmosphere on set was tense, filled with people seeking approval no one could give. Reed later said she was terrified most of the time. When the film premiered, reception was underwhelming, and Stewart, disappointed by its failure, blamed her. Time has since reversed that judgment; Reed is now cemented in cinema history as Mary Bailey.

By 1953, her career had stalled. She was under contract at Columbia, where studio head Harry Cohn, a man she privately likened to a little dictator, had pushed her into forgettable films like Saturday’s Hero. Against her wholesome image and against long odds, she auditioned for the role of Alma, a prostitute, in From Here to Eternity. Cohn made her audition twice, dyeing her hair black and telling her not to ask questions.

In February 1953, late on a Friday night, he offered her the part, ordering her to start rehearsals Monday morning. Reed felt like an outsider on the set, aware that her casting was due to Cohn’s influence. She struggled to fit in with cast members known for hard drinking and fast living. Her most daunting moment came during the final shipboard scene opposite Deborah Kerr, a fellow actress whose stature nearly overwhelmed her.

Yet when From Here to Eternity premiered, it was a sensation. Reed graced the cover of Life magazine in August 1953, and on the evening of March 25, 1954, she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, running from the back of the theater to the stage as every camera captured her triumph. The Oscar did not bring her freedom. Cohn and others continued to dominate her choices, and she found herself paired with rising male stars like Rock Hudson and Robert Francis, a sign, she recognized, that studios saw her as nearing the end of her prime.

She missed out on roles she wanted, including Heaven Knows Mr. Allison and Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. She turned down a part in Around the World in 80 Days, fearing another ethnic role so soon after playing one would be unwise, and watched Shirley MacLaine take the part in what became the biggest film of 1956. By 1957, at thirty-seven, she worried that time was overtaking her.

Then a photograph changed her path again. John Mitchell, a Columbia vice president, saw a picture in her husband’s office showing a joyful, windswept Donna on the Iowa farm surrounded by her children and a lamb. He convinced her that her real-life persona as a wife and mother belonged on television. She initially thought it was a joke.

The Donna Reed Show premiered on September 24, 1958, with Reed in plain house dresses, largely confined to the kitchen. Critics were dismissive at first, one remarking that the family was probably nice to live with but not funny. The sponsor, Campbell Soup, told her not to collapse over the ratings. By late November, after eight episodes, ratings improved, and a TV Guide critic praised her as welcome as a late summer breeze.

The show ran for eight seasons and 274 episodes, and Donna Stone became a fixture in American homes. Reed insisted on realism over gimmicks, and she refused to let her husband be played as a foolish sitcom buffoon, demanding a male lead who commanded respect. By the time the show ended in 1966, Reed, then forty-five, was exhausted but restless. The Vietnam War was intensifying, and she found herself deeply affected by the nightly broadcasts.

She sat and suffered silently, paralyzed except for voting. That year she voted against her friend Ronald Reagan in the California governor’s race, appalled by his criticism of young protesters and by hints that the war could be ended with full technological resources. Her sons were approaching draft age. Both opposed the war, and their influence pushed her to reconsider her own views.

Joining a Beverly Hills group called Another Mother for Peace in early 1967, she became a co-chairman of an organization that grew to 285,000 members nationwide. They did not march or picket; they wrote floods of well-researched letters to Congress. Reed supported anti-war congressmen, hosted fundraising dinners for Representative George Brown of California, and found her efforts exhausting and often disappointing. In the autumn of 1970, Reed and fellow activist Dorothy Jones discovered a map in an obscure publication detailing vast petroleum reserves off the coasts of Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia.

They spent months investigating, consulting experts from Stanford and UCLA. By the winter of 1971 they published their findings in the Another Mother for Peace newsletter under the headline Are Our Sons Dying for Offshore Oil. Reed was careful not to accuse anyone of starting the war for oil, but she insisted the question of whether American foreign policy was being shaped by oil profits had to be asked. In 1971 she met Colonel Grover Asmus, a divorced military adviser who had served in Vietnam.

He proposed to her nearly every day for three years, at one point sending her five hundred birthday cards from different locations. Despite their political differences, she felt at ease with him. She finally agreed in 1974, joking that she had not found his dark side yet. They married on August 30, 1974.

His work on the trans-Alaska pipeline softened her earlier opposition to big oil. She reviewed the safety plans and concluded the pipeline could likely be done safely, though she doubted the country needed it. She drifted away from Another Mother for Peace and turned her attention to the stock market, where she impressed her brokers by trading options profitably. In the early 1980s she attempted a comeback.

After Carl Betz, her television husband, died of lung cancer in 1978, a proposed reunion series collapsed. In 1984, the producers of Dallas, having considered and rejected five hundred other candidates, offered her the role of Miss Ellie, the family matriarch. The media hype was intense, but the experience soured quickly. Reed was displeased with her onscreen appearance, believing the cinematographer had not been allowed to shoot her as he had during tests.

Her screen time was reduced, and in early 1985, while vacationing in Paris, she received a call from her agent informing her she had been fired. She had a two-year contract remaining. The producers gave no reason. Humiliated and struggling with illness, she returned home to a summer of court hearings.

A judge denied her request to block another actress from appearing as Miss Ellie, and in September 1985 she reached a settlement to receive her regular salary for the remaining two years. The stress took a physical toll. She described her stomach being in an uproar, and in late October doctors discovered a cancerous mass on her pancreas. She was given about six months to live, though she was not told it was terminal.

She maintained her composure, staying well groomed and trying to keep those around her in good spirits. On the evening of January 11, 1986, her son Tony Jr. visited, and they watched a game show together. As he left, he knew it would be the last time he would see his mother.

She died on January 14, just two weeks shy of her sixty-fifth birthday, her grave marked by a simple stone near those of Natalie Wood and, almost directly aligned with her own resting place, the vault containing Marilyn Monroe. Long after the war that consumed her final years of activism came to an end, the question she had asked about oil and its influence on American policy remained the subject of public debate. The woman who had been pulled from a doomed flight in 1945 had spent the decades since trying to answer why she had been spared, channeling her survival into both comfort and conviction.