Loretta Young

Loretta Young was one of the few top actresses who, having started in silent movies, successfully made the transition first to Talkies and then, spectacularly, to television. She was a success in each medium. She will, however, always be remembered first and foremost, as the mother of Clark Gable's illegitimate daughter.

Her career in movies began as a child actress in silents and then she became a major player in Talkies during Hollywood's golden age, and in 1947 she achieved the Best Actress Award. After movie success came television success as she gained three Emmys for her hit show 'The Loretta Young Show'.

She has achieved pre-eminence as a Hollywood legend and her great talent and beauty live on.

Biography

Loretta was born as Gretchen Young in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1913. When she was 3 and her mother moved the family to Los Angeles to run a boarding house there. Her father shortly after disappeared and her brother, John, was removed from the family and adopted. Gretchen and her sisters helped their mother run the boarding house. Soon all three girls, helped by an uncle who worked in one of the studios, became child actors in the up and coming movie industry in nearby Hollywood.

Gretchen's elder sisters, Polly Ann Young and Elizabeth Jane Young (later to become better known as Sally Blane) were the first to appear on screen but they were soon joined by the four years old Gretchen. Her first serious part was at the age of 14, after attending convent school in the silent movie 'Naughty But Nice'. It was during the manking of the=is movie that she changed her name to Loretta, on the advice of the star, Colleen Moore. The new Loretta continued to have roles in successful Silents such as 'The Magnificent Flirt' and The Head Man, both in 1928.

Her first leading role was in 1929 with Lon Chaney,in Laugh Clown Laugh, one of the last significant movies of the Silent age.In the same year she made her first Talkie, 'The Squall', and she was placed under contract with Daryll Zanuck of Warner Brothers. Zanuck later left Warners for Twentieth Century Fox in 1934, and Loretta followed him and made many successful films for Zanuck.

Loretta proved to be a hard worker and a fast learner and she was always in work, making several new movies each year. All told, she made a total of 88 movies between 1927 and 1953 and starred with most of the top actors of the day.

In 1930 she met the fast-living, hard-drinking actor, Grant Withers, who was divorced and nine years her senior. They were appearing in 'The Second Floor Mystery' together. They eloped together and made national headlines, but the marriage did not work out and was annulled the following year. Loretta privately complained that she had been paying all the bills and she successfully managed to keep the marriage out of her official biographies.

Gradually Loretta achieved a reputation for hard work and quality perfomances and each yearshe was given biggerand better roles although invariably the movies were not top raters. This was to change in 1935 when Loretta was chosen to play the female lead in The Call of the Wild with the current undisputed 'King' of Hollywood, Clark Gable. It was a sign of how highly regarded Loretta had become and it was a move which would have a significant effect on her future life.

Gable and Loretta had a passionate affair, both onscreen and off and Loretta became pregnant. This was an era when all major stars had strict morality clauses in their contracts, and it was unthinkable for a female star to have a baby out of wedlock - and the fact that Clark Gable was married made matters worse.

Loretta went to Europe with her mother, announcing to the world that she was having a long vacation. She had the baby, a girl named Judith whom she claimed to have adopted. In 1940 Loretta married businessman Tom Lewis, and from then on the child was called Judy Lewis, although Tom Lewis never legally adopted her.

Loretta's daughter, Judy did not discover, until years later, who her biological father was. She herself briefly became an actress before becoming a psychologist and she later wrote a book "Uncommon Knowledge" disclosing the truth of her parentage.

Four years after her marriage to Tom Lewis, Loretta had a son, Christopher and later another son Peter Charles.

Loretta's movie career continued to flourish and she was still making several films each year. In the late 1940's her hard work began to pay off.

She made an impressive appearance as the wife of a renegde Nazi in Orson Welles's 'The Stranger', in 1946, and then the following year she won the Best Actress Award with her first nomination in the comedy 'The Farmer's Daughter', a movie about a Swedish-born girl who works as a maid for a United States congressman, and eventually becomes a congresswoman herself.

In the the same year she starred in 'The Bishop's Wife', another successful movie which is still a Christmas television favourite to this day. She also received an Academy Award nomination for her role in 'Come To The Stable' in 1949.

Originally called 'Letter to Loretta', the series was renamed 'The Loretta Young Show' and each week Loretta still introduced a different story, entering at the beginning of each episode, and swirling her designer fashions as she walked up to the camera. She was in effect, putting on a mini-fashion show, and the spectacular entrance became Young's and the series's trademark. Glamour and fashion had been important elements of her film star image, and she now became television's first First Lady, and she was more famous and popular than she had ever been as a movie star.

She won three Emmys, the first in 1955 as best dramatic actress in a continuing series.

After having been divorced from Tom Lewis since 1969 Loretta surprised her friends and family, and maybe herself, by getting married again, in 1993 at the age of 80, this time to fashion designer Jean Louis, 5 years her senior. He died 4 years later.

Loretta Young died on August 12, 2000 at age 87 due to ovarian cancer.