Nancy Reagan appeared in eleven films
She moved to California after passing a screen test and signing a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (MGM) in 1949. "Joining Metro was like walking into a dream world," she later remarked. Her attractive appearance—centered on her large eyes—and somewhat distant and understated demeanor made her difficult to cast and publicize at first. Nancy Reagan appeared in eleven feature films, most of which starred her as a "loyal housewife," "responsible young mother," or "steady woman." Jane Powell, Debbie Reynolds, Leslie Caron, and Janet Leigh were among the actresses she competed with for MGM roles.
Nancy's film career began in 1949 with small supporting roles in two films, The Doctor and the Girl starring Glenn Ford, and East Side, West Side starring Barbara Stanwyck. In the film Shadow on the Wall (1950), she played a child psychiatrist alongside Ann Sothern and Zachary Scott. New York Times critic A. H. Weiler praised her performance as "beautiful and convincing." She co-starred in the 1950s film The Next Voice You Hear... as a pregnant housewife who hears God's voice through her radio.
The New York Times' influential reviewer Bosley Crowther wrote, "Nancy Davis is delightful as a gentle, plain, and understanding wife." Davis made her screen debut in Night into Morning, a bereavement drama starring Ray Milland, in 1951. Davis "does nicely as the fiancée who is widowed herself and knows the loneliness of grief," according to Crowther, while Davis "is splendid as the understanding widow," according to The Washington Post's Richard L. Coe. MGM released Davis from her contract in 1952, and she sought a broader range of parts while also marrying Reagan and having her first child that year. Soon after, she appeared in the science fiction film Donovan's Brain (1953). Crowther stated that Davis, who played the "sadly baffled wife" of a possessed scientist, "walked through it all in stark confusion" in an "utterly silly" film. Hellcats of the Navy (1957), her next-to-last film, she played nurse Lieutenant Helen Blair and appeared in a film with her husband for the first time, playing what one critic described as "a housewife who came along for the ride." However, another reviewer stated that Davis plays her part well and "does well with what she has to work with."
