Lois Wheeler Snow, a former actress and writer whose criticism of human rights abuses in China was amplified by the legacy of her husband, the American journalist Edgar Snow, the author of the landmark book “Red Star Over China,” died on April 3 at a hospital in Nyon, Switzerland. She was 97.

Her daughter, Sian Snow, confirmed the death. Her mother had lived in Switzerland since 1959.

Lois Wheeler was an up-and-coming Broadway actress in 1949 when she married Mr. Snow, who was best known for “Red Star Over China” (1937), a sympathetic portrayal of China’s struggling young Communist revolutionaries. It introduced many Western readers to Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and others who would go on to lead the People’s Republic of China.

“China became part of my life when I met and married Edgar Snow,” Ms. Snow wrote in an essay in 2011.

On her first visit to that country, in 1970, she and her husband were treated like royalty. She attended a Ping-Pong match with Zhou, the first premier of the People’s Republic; dined with Soong Ching-ling, the wife of Sun Yat-sen; and, notably, stood with her husband alongside Mao on the Tiananmen rostrum during the National Day Parade — a gesture later understood to be a signal from Mao to President Richard M. Nixon that Beijing was willing to reopen ties with Washington.