Hollywood Mourns Loretta Young
Loretta Young, the elegant beauty whose acting career extended from silent movies to television and included an Academy Award for best actress in The Farmer's Daughter, died Saturday of ovarian cancer, her longtime agent and friend Norman Brokaw said. She was 87.
Young died at her sister's home early Saturday morning, said Brokaw, her agent for 50 years and chairman of the William Morris Agency.
"She was an incredible lady," Brokaw said. "I learned from her that if you can handle yourself with class and dignity, you can work as long as you want in this business."
Both on and off the screen, Young presented the image of serene uprightness. In 88 movies dating from 1927 to 1953, she invariably played the strong-willed heroine with firm principles, starring opposite the biggest male actors on the silver screen, including Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, John Wayne, John Barrymore, James Cagney, Cary Grant, David Niven, Joel McCrea, Robert Mitchum, William Holden and Joseph Cotten.
CBS News Correspondent Jacqueline Adams reports that when movie roles began to dwindle, Young moved to television, a burgeoning medium that offered a gifted actress meaty roles.
From 1953 to 1963, she appeared on television in more than 300 episodes of The Loretta Young Show, opening the program with her much-satirized trademark of sweeping through a doorway, always in a high-style gown. She was nominated seven times for Emmys as best starring actress and won three times.
"During the series I played every role possible—Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Indian, old, ugly, young, pretty," she remarked in a 1973 interview. "It was a marvelous experience for an actress to do everything she had ever wanted to do. I got it out of my system."
 AP Photo "At long last!" were the words from Loretta Young as she won the Oscar for The Farmer's Daughter after nearly 30 years of work on screen. |
In an interview with CBS News, Washington Post media critic Tom Shales says Young was a trailblazer in being the first woman to host an anthology series.
"I think she'll be remembered as one of the most important women in the Golden Age of Hollywood, an actress who asserted her authority when she needed to," said Shales.
A shapely beauty with large blue-gray eyes and high cheekbones, Young catapulted to stardom at age 15 in 1928 in Laugh, Clown, Laugh, Between 1929 and 1930 she appeared in 15 movies, inclding Broken Dishes with the bluff, hard-drinking actor Grant Withers.
She eloped with him when she was 17, and they lived together for eight months before she filed for divorce in 1931, claiming she paid most of the bills.
Her career flourished in the 1930s and 1940s with contracts with Warner Bros.-First National and then 20th Century-Fox for films like Born to Be Bad, The House of Rothschild, The Devil to Pay, Caravan, Bedtime Story, The Lady from Cheyenne, China, Along Came Jones, and The Stranger.
 AP Photo Loretta Young in 1986, when she appeared in the television movie Christmas Eve. |
The film won Young the best actress Academy Award in 1947.
A lifelong Roman Catholic, the actress worked tirelessly for the church's charities, including a home for unwed mothers and a children's foundation.
She insisted on propriety on her movie sets, and even enforced a kitty for her charities, to which set workers contributed a coin every time they swore. Legend has it that on Rachel and the Stranger, the irreverent Mitchum loosed a spate of profanity and dropped $5 into the kitty.
She was born Gretchen Young on Jan. 6, 1913, in Salt Lake City, where her father was a railroad auditor. When Young was 3, her father abandoned his family. Her mother moved the children to Los Angeles and opened a boarding house.
An uncle in the movie business found work for the Young girls as extras, and Young started when she was 5. Eight years later, director Mervyn Leroy called the Young house with a role for her sister, Polly Ann, in Naughty but Nice.
"Polly Ann isn't here; will I do?" Young inquired. She made her acting debut in the comedy, and the star, Colleen Moore, changed the 13-year-old's name to Loretta.
Throughout her career and afterward, she always appeared the movie queen, with perfect coiffure and makeup, dressed in the latest fashion, upbeat in her view of life. On the screen and off, she always seemed taller than her 5 feet 5 inches. She seldom varied from 109 pounds.
In 1940 she married broadcast executive Thomas Lewis, and they had two sons, Christopher, born in 1944, and Peter, in 1945. Young and Lewis were separated for many years before she divorced him in 1969.
In August 1993, Young surprised her friends by marrying fashion designer Jean Louis. She was 80, he was 85. Jean Louis died in April 1997.
Funeral arrangements are incomplete. Young is survived by her sister, daugher Judy, of Los Angeles, and two sons, Peter, of Solvang, and Christopher, of Palm Springs.
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