Maureen Reagan

Maureen Reagan, the outspoken daughter of former President Ronald Reagan who was often at odds with her father's policies, died August 8 2001 at her home in Sacramento. She was 60, and had suffered a recurrence of melanoma, a skin cancer with which she was first diagnosed in 1996 and that, after some years in remission, recurred last fall. Ms. Reagan was a politically active feminist who worked to support the proposed equal rights amendment, lobbied for abortion rights and helped elect women to public office. She had a distant relationship with her father for decades after he and her mother, the actress Jane Wyman, divorced in 1948. Ms. Reagan, too, tried her hand at politics. She was twice defeated in Republican primary races in California, for the United States Senate in 1982 and for a Southern California Congressional seat in 1992. Her first campaign was undermined by reports that her father, then president, did not want her involved in the race, but a decade later he endorsed her Congressional run. She went to Emerson Junior High School in Los Angeles and to high school at Immaculate Heart in Hollywood. After a year at Marymount College of Virginia in Arlington she dropped out. Her brief television and movie career was followed by a stint as a talk show host on KABC Radio in Los Angeles, and in 1969 she joined a U.S.O. tour of Vietnam. Ms. Reagan's book revealed that she had been the victim of domestic violence in her first marriage, in 1960, to John Filippone, a Washington policeman. The marriage lasted barely a year. A 1964 marriage to David Sills, a Marine lieutenant, ended in divorce in 1968. Her husband of 20 years, Dennis Revell, a public relations executive in Sacramento, survives her as does a daughter, Rita, whom the couple adopted from Uganda in 1994. In addition to her father, stepmother and siblings, she is also survived by her mother.