Loretta Young

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Loretta Young (born Gretchen Young; January 6, 1913 – August 12, 2000) was an American actress.

She began as a child actor and had a long and varied career in film, from 1917 to 1953.

She received the 1948 Academy Award for her performance in The Farmer's Daughter, 1947, and was nominated for her role in Come to the Stable in 1949.

Young then transitioned to television, where she starred in The Loretta Young Show, a dramatic anthology series from 1953 to 1961.

The series received three Emmy Awards, and it was re-run on daytime television and later in syndication.

Young returned to the small screen in the 1980s and received a Golden Globe for her role in 1985's Christmas Eve.

Early life

Gretchen Young was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and she was the niece of Gladys (née Royal) and John Earl Young. She was of Luxembourgish descent. Michaela was the name she gave when she was confirmed. When she was two years old, her parents separated, and when she was three, her mother moved the family to Hollywood. Gretchen was the most popular of the three siblings, Polly Ann and Elizabeth Jane (better known as Sally Blane) all performed as child actors, but of the three, she was the most popular.

In the silent film Sweet Kitty Bellairs, Young's first appearance was at the age of two or three. Ramona Convent Secondary School was a preparatory school student during her high school years. She was signed to a John McCormick, husband and director of actor Colleen Moore, who noticed the young girl's potential. Loretta Moore gave her the name Loretta, revealing that it was the name of her favorite doll.

Personal life

Young was married three times and had three children. In 1930, she married actor Grant Withers for the first time. The wedding was annulled the following year. She had a well-publicized affair with actor Spencer Tracy (who was married to Louise Tracy), her co-star in Man's Castle from September 1933 to June 1934. Tom Lewis, a young married producer, died in 1940. Peter Lewis, member of the San Francisco rock band Moby Grapes, and Christopher Lewis, a film producer, had two sons: Peter Lewis (of the San Francisco rock band Moby Grape) and Christopher Lewis, a film producer. In 1969, Young and Lewis married in a divorce.

Young married Jean Louis, the French fashion designer, in 1993. The couple's marriage lasted until his death in April 1997. Young was godmother to Marlo Thomas (the daughter of TV actress Danny Thomas).

Since the age of eight, a young child at the time, Young stopped smoking in the mid-1980s and regained ten pounds.

Young and Clark Gable, the romantic leads of the 1935 Twentieth Century Pictures film The Call of the Wild, were Clark and Clark Gable. Young was then 22 years old, and he married Maria "Ria" Langham when she was 34 years old. Young became pregnant by Gable during filming.

Young did not want to jeopardize her career or Gable's. She knew that if Twentieth Century Pictures of the pregnancy emerged, they would expect an abortion; Young, a devout Catholic, called abortion a mortal sin. The young, her sisters, and her mother had devised a plot to conceal the pregnancy and then release the child as adopted. When Young's pregnancy began to advance, she went on a "vacation" to England. She gave an interview from her bed, swath of blankets, and then explained that her long movie absence was due to a health condition she had had since childhood. Judith Young gave birth to Judith, a child born in Venice, California, on November 6, 1935. Judith was a young boy who was named after St. Jude because he was the patron saint of (among other things) difficult situations. Judith was put in an orphanage weeks after her birth. Judith spent the next 19 months in various "hideaways and orphanages" before being reunited with her mother; Young then claimed she had adopted Judith. Judith took Lewis' last name after Young married Tom Lewis.

Many people in Hollywood were deceived by the ruse. Lewis, Judith (Judy) Lewis had a strong similarity to Gable, and her true parentage was widely circulated in entertainment circles. Lewis' mother confronted Young about her child; Young later admitted that Lewis was "a walking mortal sin." Young refused to confirm or comment publicly about the allegations until 1999, when Joan Wester Anderson wrote Young's official biography. Young wrote that Lewis was her biological child and the product of a brief friendship with Gable in interviews with Anderson. After her death, young would not allow the book to be published until after it was announced.

Linda Lewis, the mother of Young's son, Christopher Lewis, told Lewis that Gable had assaulted her in 1998. According to Linda Lewis, Young said that no consensual intimate contact between Gable and herself had occurred. Young had never told anyone that the rape had been revealed. Young said she shared this information only after learning of the possibility of date rape from Larry King Live; she had already thought it was a woman's job to avoid men's advances and feared her inability to thwart Gable's assault as a moral blunder on her part. Until after both Young and Judy Lewis died, Linda Lewis said the family remained silent about Young's rape alley until after both Young and Judy Lewis had died.

Young was a lifelong Republican. In 1952, she appeared in radio, print, and magazine advertisements in favor of Dwight D. Eisenhower's bid for president of the United States. She was among others at his inauguration in 1953, as well as Anita Louise, Louella Parsons, Jane Russell, Dick Powell, June Allyson, and Lou Costello. In 1968 and 1980, respectively, she was a vocal advocate for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in their presidential campaigns. Young, along with her close friends Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, William Holden, George Murphy, Fred Astaire, and John Wayne, were all active members of the Hollywood Republican Committee, as well as young Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers, Ginger Rogers, Henry Moore, George Murphy, Fred Astaire, and John Wayne.

Later life

Jane Wyman, Irene Dunne, and Rosalind Russell all dedicated themselves to volunteer work for charities and churches from the time Young's retirement in the 1960s to not long before her death. She was a member of the Good Shepherd of Beverly Hills and the Catholic Motion Picture Guild in Beverly Hills, California. During her acting career, Young, a devout Catholic, worked with several Catholic charities. Young came out of retirement to appear in two television films: Christmas Eve (1986) and Lady in a Corner (1989). She received a Golden Globe Award for the former and was nominated for the second time.

A jury in Los Angeles awarded Young $550,000 in a lawsuit against NBC for breach of contract in 1972. The complaint, which was filed in 1966, alleged that NBC had allowed foreign television networks to re-run old episodes of The Loretta Young Show, without excluding the first segment in which Young made her appearance, as agreed by the parties. Young argued that her image had been harmed by being seen in "outdated gowns." She had requested damages of $1.9 million.

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Career

In the silent film Sirens of the Sea (1917), Young was billed as Gretchen Young. Loretta Young appeared in The Whip Woman for the first time in 1928. She costarred with Lon Chaney in the MGM film Laugh, Clown, Laugh the same year. She was voted one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars this year and will be on display at the WAMPAS Baby Awards next year.

When she was 17, she married Grant Withers, a 26-year-old actress; they were married in Yuma, Arizona. The marriage was annulled the next year, just as their second film (ironically titled Too Young to Marry) was announced.

She costarred with Cary Grant in Born to be Bad in 1934, and Clark Gable and Jack Oakie appeared in the film version of Jack London's The Call of the Wild, directed by William Wellman, in 1935.

Young became Femme Courageous (1944; re-issued as Fury in the Sky), the fictionalized story of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron during World War II. It depicted a team of female pilots who flew bomber planes from the factory to their final destinations. Young starred in up to eight films a year, and her 1940 films were among the most influential and well-remembered of her career.

Young made The Stranger in 1946, in which she plays a small-town American woman who unknowingly marries a Nazi fugitive (Orson Welles). Welles later revealed that during a pivotal scene, the film's producer ordered a close-up of Young, a move that director Welles called "fatal" to the scene's impact. Young took the director's route, as well as getting her agent to call Welles' house to go on Welles' side. "Imagine getting a actor's agent to make sure she doesn't get a closeup." The welles were later reported. "She was magical." "The lonesome Miss Young has the most challenging job," writer Richard L. Coe wrote in the Washington Post, "the starry-eyed bride of the early reels has to shift from the glamorous starry-eyed bride to the woman who must admit that her husband is one of the most feared of men."

Young received an award for her role in The Farmer's Daughter, a feminist drama in which she had to learn a Swedish accent. Young learned how to get one from Ruth Roberts, who had worked with Ingrid Bergman on how to lose her Swedish accent. She co-starred with Cary Grant and David Niven in The Bishop's Wife, a perennial favorite that was remade in 1996 as The Preacher's Wife starring Denzel Washington, Whitney Houston, and Courtney B. Vance. She received another Academy Award nomination in 1949 for Come to the Stable. She appeared in her last theatrical film, It Happens Every Thursday, a Universal comedy involving a New York couple who move to California to take over a struggling weekly newspaper.

Young hosted and appeared in the well-received half-hour anthology television series Letter to Loretta (soon renamed The Loretta Young Show), which first appeared on television from 1953 to 1961. She received three Emmy awards for the program. Her trademark was a dramatic entrance through a living room door in a variety of high-fashion evening gowns. She returned at the end of the program to give a brief excerpt from the Bible or a famous quote that related to the evening's tale. (Young's introductions and concluding remarks were not re-run on television because she legally guaranteed that they not be re-run on television because she did not want the dresses she wore in those segments to make the program look dated.) The program ran on NBC for eight years, marking the longest-running primetime television program ever hosted by a woman up to that time.

Each drama was based on the assumption that each drama was an answer to a question raised in her fan mail. During the first season (as of the episode of February 14, 1954), the title was changed to The Loretta Young Show, but the "letter" concept was dropped at the end of the second season. Young was hospitalized as a result of overwork, which required a number of guest hosts and guests; her first appearance in the 1955-1956 season was for the Christmas show. Young appeared in only half of each season's shows as an actor and served as the program's host for the remainder from then on.

The series was re-run as the Loretta Young Theatre in daytime by NBC from 1960 to 1964, according to Minus Young's introductions and conclusions. It appeared in syndication in the early 1970s before being banned.

Young appeared in The New Loretta Young Show on CBS in the 1962-1963 television season as Christine Massey, a freelance magazine journalist and the mother of seven children. Against ABC's Ben Casey, it did not do well in the ratings on Monday evenings. After a one-season of 26 episodes, it was cancelled.

Select episodes from Young's personal collection's 1990s were released on home video and often shown on cable television, with the opening and closing segments (and original title) intact.

Young was recognized by the Women in Film Crystal Award in 1988 for outstanding women whose perseverance and their dedication to their roles helped expand the role of women in the film industry.

Young has two actors on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: one for her television appearances, at 6135 Hollywood Boulevard, and the other for her work in motion pictures, 6100 Hollywood Boulevard. In 2011, a Golden Palm Springs, California, Walk of Stars Founder Julie Carson was dedicated to her.

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