Jeanette Nolan began her acting career in the Pasadena Community Playhouse and, while a student at Los Angeles City College, made her radio debut in 1932 in "Omar Khayyam", the first transcontinental broadcast from station KHJ. Her film debut was probably also her best part, Lady Macbeth opposite director/actor Orson Welles's Macbeth. Her final film role was as Tom Booker's ('Robert Redford' 's) mother Ellen Booker in The Horse Whisperer. She appeared in more than 300 television shows, including episode roles in Perry Mason, I Spy, MacGyver, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and as a regular on The Richard Boone Show and The Men from Shiloh. She received four Emmy nominations. She died, aged 86, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, following a stroke.
Mother of actor Tim McIntire and Holly McIntire. During the Golden Age of radio through the 1930s and 1940s, she provided the voices of a variety characters on such programs as "The March of Time", "Cavalcade of America", "The Court of Missing Heirs", "The Adventures of Mister Meek", "Life Begins" and "Manhattan at Midnight". On many of these dramatic performances she collaborated with her then husband, the late actor John McIntire. Nolan has the rather curious distinction of having provided a series of screams for "mother" in Psycho in which, coincidentally, her husband played Sheriff Chambers.