Character actress Jeanette Nolan died at 86, after 70-year career on stage, TV and in films Jeanette Nolan seemed bound to be some kind of performer even as a little girl, her sister says. Nolan, whose career as an actress spanned 70 years, including a featured role in "The Horse Whisperer," died Friday in Beverly Hills at 86.

"The Horse Whisperer," with Robert Redford, was her last picture.

"I think she just loved performing," says Miriam Walker, of Ashland, Nolan's sister. "She always seemed like she was headed for show business."

Nolan appeared opposite Orson Welles in "Macbeth," as Helen Keller's teacher, Annie Sullivan, in "The Miracle Worker," in films from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" to "The Horse Whisperer" and in TV series from "Gunsmoke" to "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

Walker, now in her 70s, says when the girls were growing up near Lincoln Park in Los Angeles, Nolan was always making up stories and acting them out.

"She was six times the storyteller I am," she says. "She started out that way.

"From the time she was a baby, she'd never stay in the crib. Sometimes she was a terror for my mother to look after."

The girls' father was a machinist. Their mother looked after the home and the girls. A brother died some years ago.

Little Jeanette's imagination sometimes kept the girls' mom busy.

"My mother would worry about her," Walker says. "She was afraid she was telling the truth."

Nolan's career started on radio in the early 1930s. Her first role was in the program "Omar Khayyam." Nolan remembers hearing her on "Chando," a popular mystery show.

"I got a big kick out of it," she remembers.

Walker last talked with her sister a little over a week ago. Nolan kept an apartment in Los Angeles and a home in northwestern Montana, about 90 miles from Kalispell, where she lived for some 50 years.

"She loved Montana," Walker says. "She was crazy about it. She felt like it was her home."

Walker says Nolan moved to Montana with her husband, actor John McIntire, after the two were married. Nolan would later appear many times alongside her husband on the TV series "Wagon Train."

Walker says Nolan didn't have a strong preference between working in films or television. But although she loved legitimate theater and performed on Broadway, she thought working live every night was too demanding.

Walker says she hasn't yet seen the Redford picture, which is playing now to generally good reviews and doing good business, but she plans to see it soon.

She says her sister told her she felt Redford, who directed, had taken a good approach to the story.

"She said he was a good actor and a nice person," she says. "They were all complaining about the rain when they were filming."

She says Nolan was a little disappointed in the editing in some of her scenes in the movie's final cut, but she knew it was "one of the things that happens."

She says she thinks her sister would like to be remembered as a fine actress and a good person.