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| Birth Name(s) : Gretchen Michaela Young |
Date of Birth: January 6, 1913 |
| Status:
Married
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Partner:
Jean Louis |
| Profession:
Actor |
Official Site
Go to the Loretta Young Official Homepage |
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Full Loretta Young Biography
Radiantly beautiful leading lady of Hollywood's Golden Age, who kept her starring career alive with a long-running TV series, "The Loretta Young Show" (1954-63), for which she won three Emmy Awards. Although she made her film debut at age three in Sweet Kitty Bellairs Loretta-whose sisters Sally Blane and Polly Ann Young were also actresses-spent her childhood getting a convent-school education. At age 15, she decided to tackle show business head on and won a contract at First National (which merged with Warner Bros.), where she played doe-eyed ingenues for the next five years. She followed Warners production chief Darryl F. Zanuck first to his 20th Century Pictures in 1934.
She later had a dispute with Zanuck, who reportedly blackballed her. The only place she could work, at first, was Columbia Pictures, whose boss Harry Cohn didn't care about Zanuck's pronouncements. By the late 1940s she and the Fox chieftain made up and she returned to his studio for several successful films.
Never accused of being a great actress, Young did have great screen presence and that indefinable something known as star quality. In many ways, she gave livelier, more interesting performances in her "little" Warners films of the early 1930s than in her glossier star vehicles of later years-but by then, her loyal following expected a certain kind of entertainment from her and she never disappointed. She won an Academy Award for her performance as the immigrant who makes good in The Farmer's Daughter (1947), and was nominated again for her portrayal of a nun in Come to the Stable (1949). In retrospect, however, one of her most impressive films is Orson Welles' The Stranger (1946), in which she develops a growing wariness about her husband, played by Welles.
Young appeared with her three sisters in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939). She was briefly married to actor Grant Withers; her second husband was producer Tom Lewis, with whom she supervised her long-running TV series. |
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Additional Loretta Young Biography
She was born in Salt Lake City, Utah as Gretchen Young (she took the name Michaela at confirmation) she moved with her family to Hollywood when she was three years old. Loretta and her sisters Polly Ann Young and Elizabeth Jane Young (screen name Sally Blane) worked as child actresses, of whom Loretta was the most successful. Young's first role was at age 3 in the silent film The Primrose Ring. The movie's star Mae Murray so fell in love with little Gretchen that she wanted to adopt her. Although her mother declined, Gretchen was allowed to live with Murray for two years. Her half-sister Georgiana (daughter of her mother and stepfather George Belzer) eventually married actor Ricardo Montalban. During her high school years, she was educated at Ramona Convent Secondary School.
She was billed as "Gretchen Young" in the 1917 film, Sirens of the Sea. It wasn't until 1928 that she was first billed as "Loretta Young", in The Whip Woman. That same year she co-starred with Lon Chaney in the MGM film Laugh, Clown, Laugh.The next year, she was anointed one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars.
In 1930, Young, then 17, eloped with 26-year-old actor Grant Withers and married him in Yuma, Arizona. The marriage was annulled the next year, just as their second movie together (ironically titled Too Young to Marry) was released.
Young made as many as seven or eight movies a year and won an Oscar in 1947 for her performance in The Farmer's Daughter. The same year she co-starred with Cary Grant and David Niven in The Bishop's Wife, a perennial favorite that still airs on television during the Christmas season and was later remade as The Preacher's Wife with Whitney Houston. In 1949, Young received another Academy Award nomination (for Come to the Stable) and in 1953 appeared in her last film, It Happens Every Thursday.
Moving to television, she hosted and starred in the well-received half hour anthology series The Loretta Young Show. Her "sweeping" trademark appearance at the beginning of each show was to appear dramatically in various high fashion evening gowns. She returned at the program's conclusion to restate to the viewer the moral of the story just seen. (Young's introductions and conclusions to her television shows, which were widely satirized at the time, are not rerun on television because she had it legally stipulated that they not be; the ever image-conscious Young didn't want to be seen in "outdated" wardrobe and hairstyles.) Her program ran in prime time on NBC for eight years, the longest-running prime time network program ever hosted by a woman up to that time.
The program, which earned her three Emmys, began with the premise that each drama was an answer to a question asked in her fan mail; the program's original title was Letter to Loretta. The title was changed to The Loretta Young Show during the first season, and the "letter" concept was dropped altogether at the end of the second season. At this time, Young's health required that there be a number of guest hosts and guest stars; her first appearance in the 1955-56 season was for the Christmas show. From this point on, Young appeared in only about half of each season's shows as an actress and merely functioned as the program host for the remainder. This program, minus Young's introductions and summarized conclusions, was rerun in daytime by NBC from 1960 to 1964 and also appeared, again without the introductions and conclusions, in syndication.
In 1935, Young had an affair with Clark Gable, who was married at the time, while on location for The Call of the Wild. During their relationship, Young became pregnant. Due to the moral codes placed on the film industry Young covered up her pregnancy in order to avoid damaging her career (as well as Gable's). Returning from a long "vacation" (during which she secretly gave birth to her daughter), Young announced that she had adopted the little girl. The child was raised as "Judy Lewis" after taking the name of Young's second husband, producer Tom Lewis. According to Lewis's autobiography Uncommon Knowledge, Lewis was made fun of because of the ears that she received from her father, Clark Gable. Over the years she had heard rumors and secretly knew that Loretta Young was her biological mother, but it was not until 1958 when Judy's future husband Joseph Tinney told her that "everybody" knew the rumors that she really began to suspect. It was not until a few years later, after becoming a mother herself, that she finally got the nerve to ask her mother, who, after promptly vomitting, admitted to her that Clark Gable was her father.
Young died at 87 from ovarian cancer at the Santa Monica, California home of her half-sister, Georgiana Montalban, and was interred in the family plot in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
Young has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — one for motion pictures, at 6104 Hollywood Blvd., and another for television, at 6141 Hollywood Blvd. |
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Loretta Young Quote(s)
| What you don't know intrigues you more than what you do know. I believed all those love stories - the hero was the hero - because that's what I grew up with. I loved the romance and the roses, but when it came to a more realistic life, I would back away. |
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