Former U.S. first lady Nancy Reagan has died, a spokeswoman for the Reagan library said Sunday. She was 94.
Reagan died Sunday morning in her home in Los Angeles, said Joanna Drake in a statement on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library’s website. The cause was congestive heart failure. The former first lady will be buried at the library in Simi Valley, California, next to her husband, former president Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004.
Reagan was born Anne Frances Robbins on July 6, 1921, in New York City to Edith Luckett, an actress, and Kenneth Robbins, a car dealer who left the family soon after she was born. In 1929, her mother married Loyal Davis, a neurosurgeon, and the family moved to Chicago. Davis formally adopted her in 1935 and her name was legally changed to Nancy Davis.
She attended Smith College in Massachusetts, graduating in 1943. She subsequently went into acting, working in film, television, and stage productions. She met Ronald Reagan, the actor who would eventually become the 40th president of the United States, and they married in 1952.
Reagan was new to politics when her husband started campaigning for governor of California in the 1960s. But she was “a quick learner, always absorbing,” and was soon advising campaign managers on strategy, said Stuart Spencer, who managed the gubernatorial campaign, in The New York Times’s obituary for the first lady.