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Born Gretchen Young on January 6, 1913 in Salt Lake City, the ever-graceful and elegant screen actress delighted audiences with her varied and versatile performances.
With a career extending from the silent era and beginning age four, albeit as an extra with her sisters, she got her first breakthrough role in Mervin LeRoy’s “Naughty But Nice”. When the director phoned to ask to speak to her older sister, Polly Ann, Gretchen substituted.
Her first leading role came in 1929 in “Laugh Clown Laugh”, one of the last “silent era” films. The same year she made “The Squall” (one of the first sound-enabled films), and, impressing Darryl Zanuck, she was signed onto a contract with Warner Brothers. When Zanuck left Warner for Twentieth Century Fox in 1934, she followed and made many successful films for him.
Appearing opposite most of the male stars of the time such as Cary Grant in “Born to be Bad” (1934), Clark Gable in “Call of the Wild” (1935) and Orson Welles in “The Stranger” (1946), her first official recognition for film came in 1947 when she won a Best Actress Oscar (despite stiff opposition) as the Swedish country girl who faces the perils of city-life in “The Farmer’s Daughter”. This evidently boosted her credentials, since she starred alongside Cary Grant and David Niven in “The Bishop’s Wife” (1948) and, in 1949, when she was Oscar-nominated for her role as a nun in 1949’s “Come to the Stable.”
But she left movies in 1953, and the transition to television was successful. She hosted her own show, “The Loretta Young Show”, which ran for a decade and was very popular. Her trademark entrances – swishing and twirling her elegant gowns – were symbols of her finesse and style.
When the show closed in 1963, the lifelong devout Catholic hosted charity events, devoting her time and efforts to needy people. She made a brief return to made-for-television films such as “Christmas Eve” (1986) and “The Lady in the Corner” (1990).
She died on August 12, 2000 at age 87 due to cancer.
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