Reagan's daughter Maureen dies

Maureen Reagan shared her father's interest in politics

Maureen Reagan, the eldest child of former US President Ronald Reagan and his first wife, actress Jane Wyman, died on Wednesday. She was 60.

Ms Reagan had suffered from skin cancer for five years, and last month her husband announced that the disease had spread to her brain.

She is fascinated by politics and is, if anything, a better speaker than Ronald Reagan is

Reagan biographer Edmund Morris

Like her father, she was active in Republican Party politics, but as a feminist she disagreed with him over key issues such as abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment.

He once described her as "my kind of Republican, fearless, energetic and surprising".

Nicknamed "Big Mo" by famously hard-nosed US newsman Sam Donaldson, Maureen Reagan was a force to be reckoned with when her father was president.

Ronald Reagan's spokesman Larry Speakes said the president's aides were all afraid of her.

"You would avoid her if possible and agree with her if you had to deal with her," he wrote in his memoir Speaking Out.

Political candidate

She was a political analyst, commentator, talk show host and author, as well as the co-chair of the Republican National Committee from 1987 to 1989.

But although she ran for office several times, she was never successful.

"She is fascinated by politics and is, if anything, a better speaker than [Ronald Reagan] is," her father's biographer, Edmund Morris, wrote in his fictionalised biography Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.

She became a spokeswoman for the Alzheimer's Association after her father developed the disease in 1994.

She is survived by her husband, Dennis C Revell, and her adopted daughter, as well as her father and mother, two brothers and a sister.