Janice Rule

Janice Rule, an actress in film and onstage who became a psychoanalyst late in her career, died Oct. 17 at her home in Manhattan. She was 72.

Born in Norwood, Ohio, Ms. Rule studied ballet and began dancing in Chicago nightclubs in her teens. She soon attracted attention in Hollywood and made her film debut in 1951 in " Goodbye, My Fancy, " with Joan Crawford and Robert Young.

She was pictured on the cover of Life magazine on Jan. 8, 1951, as a rising young actress. Her films in the 1950s included " Starlift, " " Holiday for Sinners, " " A Woman ' s Devotion " and " Bell, Book and Candle, " in which she was the strait-laced fiancee who loses James Stewart.

In 1953, Ms. Rule was in the original cast of William Inge ' s " Picnic, " which was Paul Newman ' s Broadway debut. She played Madge Owens, the naive beauty.

Among her other Broadway shows were " The Flowering Peach, " " The Happiest Girl in the World " and Michael V. Gazzo ' s " Night Circus, " a 1958 production with Ben Gazzara, whom she later married. That marriage ended in divorce, as had her previous marriages to N. Richard Nash and Robert Thom.

Ms. Rule was also in the film " The Swimmer " in 1968, with Burt Lancaster, and Robert Altman ' s " 3 Women " in 1977, with Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek.

During the 1960s, she became interested in psychoanalysis. She began studying it in 1973 and received a Ph.D. 10 years later from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in Los Angeles. She practiced in New York and Los Angeles and continued to act occasionally.

She is survived by her daughters, Kate Thom Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gazzara, both of Brooklyn, N.Y.; her sisters, Ann Nader, of San Marcos, Kathleen Rule, of Oceano, and Emily Forbes, of Las Cruces, N.M.; and her brother Ralph, of Mallorca, Spain.