Ronald Wilson Reagan was born on 6 February 1911 in Tampico, Illinois, the younger son of Jack Reagan, a shoe salesman, and Nelle Wilson Reagan. He grew up in Dixon, where he worked summers as a lifeguard at Lowell Park, and graduated from Eureka College in 1932 with a degree in economics, according to the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. He died at his home in Los Angeles on 5 June 2004, aged 93.

Reagan began as a radio sports announcer at WOC in Davenport, Iowa, before moving to WHO in Des Moines, where he re-created Chicago Cubs games from telegraph reports. A screen test in California in 1937 led to a Warner Bros contract that started at $200 a week, according to the Miller Center. He appeared in more than 50 films between 1937 and 1957, with Knute Rockne, All American (1940) and Kings Row (1942) his best-regarded roles. During the Second World War, poor eyesight kept him from combat and he served with the Army Air Forces’ First Motion Picture Unit.

Reagan’s second career began in 1954, when MCA negotiated a deal for him to host General Electric Theater on CBS at a starting salary of $125,000 a year, according to Slate, a contract the Miller Center records as later reaching $150,000. The role also made him GE’s travelling spokesman, and those plant-floor speeches shaped the message he delivered in his October 1964 address for Barry Goldwater, “A Time for Choosing”, which turned him into a political figure overnight.

Our estimate is that the work itself – acting, broadcasting and public office – paid Reagan roughly $10 million to $13 million in the money of the day. Twenty years on a Warner Bros contract that began at $200 a week and rose into the thousands account for $1 million to $2 million; eight years at General Electric for about $1.1 million; eight as Governor of California on a state salary in the mid-forty-thousands for about $350,000; and two terms as president at $200,000 a year for $1.6 million. The remaining $7 million came in 1989 alone, from a reported $5 million memoir and speech package and a $2 million trip to Japan (UPI). Eight months out of office earned him more than five decades of salaried work had.

Reagan served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1947 to 1952 and again in 1959, and was elected Governor of California in 1966 by nearly a million votes, serving two terms. He won the presidency in 1980 and was re-elected in 1984 in one of the largest landslides in American history, carrying 49 states.

In office he cut income tax rates, pursued a military build-up and, in his second term, negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev towards the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first agreement to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons, as summarised by the Miller Center, which also covers his domestic record, including the 1986 Tax Reform Act.

Reagan left office in January 1989 with high approval ratings, and his reputation has remained strong in surveys of historians and the public. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum opened in Simi Valley, California, in 1991 and is run jointly by the National Archives and the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. Washington’s National Airport and a US Navy aircraft carrier also bear his name.

Before politics, Reagan was a paid corporate spokesman: his General Electric years combined hosting duties with speeches promoting the company, at $125,000 a year at the outset, according to Slate. In the 1940s and 1950s he also appeared in print advertisements, including for Chesterfield cigarettes, a routine arrangement for contract film stars of the era. After the presidency, his paid appearances were arranged through the Washington Speakers Bureau, which signed him and Nancy Reagan as exclusive lecture clients in 1989, as reported by The Washington Post.

Reagan was never a businessman in the corporate sense. His private wealth came largely from California land: the United Press International analysis of his 1985 disclosure concluded that the Reagans owed their millionaire status to land dealings spanning three decades, including a Malibu-area ranch sold at a large profit and a 771-acre Riverside County ranch he sold in 1976 while holding $600,000 of mortgages on it.

On becoming president, his investments other than his two homes were converted to cash and placed in a blind trust, as the White House announced in 1981 in a statement preserved by the American Presidency Project.

Reagan’s best-known property was Rancho del Cielo, a 688-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Mountains above Santa Barbara, bought in 1974 and used as the Western White House (Reagan Library). He paid $526,000 for it; by 1985 it was estimated at $1.75 million to $2.25 million, and it sold in 1998 to Young America’s Foundation for more than $5 million (CNN).

In retirement the Reagans lived at 668 St. Cloud Road in Bel Air, a three-bedroom house they occupied from 1988 until their deaths. It sold in 2016 for $15 million (The Hollywood Reporter).