Loretta Young jewellery
Loretta Young jewellery
An actress known within the film industry as ‘Hollywood’s Beautiful Hack’, she starred in so many mediocre movies. In a career that began in 1927, Young appeared in more than 90 films, yet she was personally memorable due to her big doe eyes and high cheekbones. She was truly one of Hollywood’s most striking beauties and one of the first to win an Oscar and an Emmy award and to command a six-figure salary.
A true jewellery lover, Loretta Young could afford a large collection of expensive high, as well as costume jewellery. Looking through her photographs, one can hardly find Loretta not wearing clips, a necklace, a brooch or a bracelet. She was synonymous with the glamour, that was Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s. In the above photo Loretta wears the brooch by Ruser, circa 1960 (est. $10/15,000).
Born Gretchen Michaela Young, she was the product of a broken home. Her mother gathered up her daughters and went to Hollywood in the hope of getting the kids into show business. Loretta was briefly a child actress in bit roles before receiving a convent education. Later, when she was 14, director Mervyn Le Roy called, wanting Loretta’s older sister, Polly Ann, for a small role in Naughty but Nice (1927). In Polly Ann’s absence, Loretta asked to play the role instead, and Le Roy agreed.
Young had a sensitive, ethereal quality on film in her youth, and she soon found plenty of work. Among her noteworthy early films were Laugh Clown Laugh (1928) and The Squall (1929), in which she proved herself capable as an actress in sound films. During the first half of the 1930s, she usually played leading roles in the movies of bigger stars; few pictures were built around her.
Loretta Young jewellery
Young’s career went into a minor tailspin during the early 1940s, and she appeared in many lesser productions, although she shined as Alan Ladd’s love interest in China (1943). By this time, she had been in the movies for more than 15 years, and yet she was only in her early thirties. She was far too beautiful and far too young to be washed up, and she proved that she possessed both the skills and the drawing power to reclaim her position as a top Hollywood star.
Loretta Young was a second-tier glamour queen who had the nickname of ‘Hollywood’s Beautiful Hack.’ Only late in her movie career did she receive the kind of rich roles that allowed her to show her talent.
Seeing no future in the movie business, Young turned to television and became the hostess and occasional star of The Loretta Young Show (1953–61). It was a rousing success and a multiple Emmy winner, thanks to her stunning wardrobe and grande-dame style, not to mention some fine dramatic moments. When the show went off the air, she resurfaced the following year in The New Loretta Young Show, but the public was no longer interested and it was soon cancelled. She lived in quiet retirement afterward, making news only in 1972 when she sued and won a court case against NBC, which had illegally aired her old TV series overseas.
Loretta Young jewellery
Young’s last television appearance was in Lady in a Corner (1989). The star of nearly 100 films died on August 12, 2000. A biography, Forever Young, by Joan Wester Anderson, revealed that Young’s “adopted” daughter, Judy, was in fact the illegitimate child of Young and Clark Gable, whose rumored liaison had been kept secret for fear that the scandal would ruin both their Hollywood careers.
Loretta Young died at age 76, on August 12, 2000, from ovarian cancer, in Santa Monica, California, and was interred in the family plot in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Her ashes were buried in the grave of her mother. Her elder sisters had both died from cancer, as did her daughter, Judy Lewis, on November 25, 2011.