Jane Wyatt, who reigned as America’s ideal suburban mom during the 1950’s when she starred with Robert Youngin the television sitcom “Father Knows Best” and who nearly lured Ronald Colman away from diplomacy and into a lamasery in Frank Capra’s 1937 film “Lost Horizon,” died on Friday at her home in Bel Air, Calif. She was 96.

Her death was confirmed by her publicist Meg McDonald, The Associated Press reported.

A petite, attractive brunette, Ms. Wyatt found it hard to avoid being typecast and wound up playing quite a few of what she described as “good wives of good men,” though she confessed she would have been happier “playing the murderer or the heavy.” She did get to play a few offbeat roles on stage and screen. In Philip Barry’s wryly titled play “The Joyous Season” (1934), she was a moody member of a family seething with petty feuds. As the wife of an attorney (Dana Andrews) in the 1947 film “Boomerang,” she became embroiled in the corruption surrounding a notorious murder. And in Lillian Hellman’s “Autumn Garden,” on Broadway in 1951, she was married to an indolent drifter (Fredric March) for whom she felt nothing but contempt.

For the most part, however, as she shuttled between Hollywood and Broadway, she was called upon to be loyal, loving and courageous. In “None but the Lonely Heart,” a 1944 film starring Cary Grant and Ethel Barrymore, she was an adoring musician who pined for an indifferent Grant. She was cast as a courageous nurse in “Canadian Pacific” (1949); as the faithful, supportive wife of a naval airman (Gary Cooper) in “Task Force” (1949); and as a happily married (to David Wayne) mother of five in “My Blue Heaven” (1950).

Her Broadway credits included “Night Music” (1940), by Clifford Odets, a Group Theater production directed by Harold Clurman, in which she played a young woman who finds the love of her life in New York; and “Hope for the Best” (1945), by William McCleery, with Ms. Wyatt as a factory worker who helps a popular columnist (Franchot Tone) see the light of liberalism.

Jane Waddington Wyatt was born on Aug. 12, 1910, in Campgaw, N.J., into a family of distinguished lineage and grew up in New York City. Her father was an investment banker, her mother a writer for Commonweal and other publications. She attended the Chapin School and studied at Barnard College for two years before joining the apprentice school at the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, Mass. Back in New York she found work as an understudy in a Broadway show, and her name was removed from the New York Social Register. Clearly, the wicked stage was no place for proper young ladies.

Not daunted, she continued to audition and soon made her Broadway debut in 1931 in A. A. Milne’s “Give Me Yesterday,” as the daughter of an ambitious British politician (Louis Calhern). She achieved a breakthrough of sorts in 1933 when she succeeded Margaret Sullavan in “Dinner at Eight,” the hit comedy by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, and then toured in the show, leading to a contract offer from Universal and her Hollywood debut in “One More River” (1934), based on John Galsworthy’s last novel.

Ms. Wyatt said at one point that her favorite film role had been in “Task Force,” opposite Gary Cooper, but she is probably best remembered for her work in “Lost Horizon,” based on the novel by James Hilton and directed by Frank Capra. Most of the film’s action takes place in Tibet in a fabled region called Shangri-La, ruled by an ancient High Lama. A plane crash brings a small group of Westerners led by a British diplomat Bob Conway (Ronald Colman) to the lamasery. There, Colman meets and is entranced by Sondra (Ms. Wyatt), an attractive young woman who has grown up in Shangri-La. The High Lama is looking for a successor, Sondra is looking for love, and the Colman character must choose whether to stay or return to the war-torn world beyond the mountains. Critics agreed that Ms. Wyatt was luminous in the role.

Ms. Wyatt had already made a number of appearances in television dramas before she joined the cast of “Father Knows Best” in 1954. The show followed the lives of the Anderson family in the Midwestern town of Springfield, with Robert Young as Jim Anderson, Ms. Wyatt as his wife, Margaret, and their three children, two of them teenagers. Family crises arose — a son’s first dance, a daughter’s first crush — and were firmly but lovingly resolved. When CBS dropped the show in 1955 there were so many protests from viewers that NBC was persuaded to pick it up. “Father Knows Best” returned to CBS for the 1959-1960 season, its final run of new episodes. The show brought Ms. Wyatt three Emmy Awards. In 1977 she returned to the role, this time as a grandmother, in two made-for-television movies, “The Father Knows Best Reunion” and “Father Knows Best: Home for Christmas.”

Ms. Wyatt married Edgar Bethune Ward in 1935. He died in 2000. She is survived by their two sons, Christopher Ward of Piedmont, Calif., and Michael Ward of Los Angeles; three grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

One of her more offbeat television parts was that of Amanda, the human mother of Mr. Spock, the pointy-eared Vulcan member of the “Star Trek” crew of space voyagers in the late 1960’s. She reprised the role in the 1986 film, “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.”