August 13, 2000

Loretta Young, Leading Lady of Film and Television, Dies at 87

By LENA WILLIAMS

	United Artists
	"CALL OF THE WILD" Loretta Young in 1935, seven years after she became a leading lady.

oretta Young, the Academy Award-winning actress whose high cheekbones, pale skin and luminous eyes made her a reigning Hollywood beauty of the 1930's and 40's, died yesterday in Los Angeles. She was 87 and lived in Palm Springs, Calif.

Miss Young, who won an Oscar as best actress for her performance in "The Farmer's Daughter" in 1947, later became a favorite of television viewers as the glowing star who twirled onto the stage in a designer gown each week to introduce an uplifting drama on "The Loretta Young Show." She retired almost 40 years ago and never returned to the big screen.

Miss Young died at the home of her sister, Georgiana Montalban, the wife of the actor Ricardo Montalban, said Norman Brokaw, the chairman of the William Morris agency and her agent for 50 years. The cause was ovarian cancer, he said.

Hers was an art learned early in life. She first appeared on screen at age 4 as a fairy in the silent film "The Primrose Ring." In 1928, she became a leading lady, starring opposite Lon Chaney in "Laugh, Clown, Laugh." In addition to "The Farmer's Daughter," in which she played an effervescent Swedish-born maid who runs for Congress, she appeared in nearly 100 films, often in the arms of such matinee idols as Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Tyrone Power or Cary Grant.

Her movies included "Taxi" with James Cagney in 1932; "Zoo in Budapest" with Gene Raymond in 1933; "Man's Castle" with Tracy, also in 1933; "Call of the Wild" with Gable in 1935; "The Stranger" with Orson Welles and Edward G. Robinson in 1946; and "The Bishop's Wife" with Grant in 1947.

Miss Young's screen image suggested a blend of virtuous poise, sensuality and vulnerability, and in fact, she once admitted to having had "crushes" on all of her leading men and to being "susceptible" to men in general. Reflecting on her appeal to moviegoers, she told Edward J. Funk, co-author of an unpublished autobiography:

	Agence France-Presse
	Loretta Young, circa 1950.

"My appeal wouldn't have been to the intellectuals or the neurotics. Nor to the shop girls and secretaries -- that would have been Joan Crawford's market. But there were an awful lot of women out there who were like me -- who were willing to play by the rules, didn't sleep around and were very aggressive. A Loretta Young movie had a happy ending; that's what it was geared to: a nice husband, nice lover, no abuse of any kind -- that's what the heroes and heroines were in those days."

While Miss Young said she considered herself more of a "movie star" than an actress, she achieved her greatest popularity as the "first lady" of dramatic television, with "The Loretta Young Show." In the half-hour anthology series, which ran on NBC from 1953 to 1961, Miss Young played characters from Queen Nefertiti to a nightclub singer. A trademark of the show was her glamorous entrance.

"I did that to mollify the show's designer, Marusha," Miss Young said in a 1995 interview. "I initially just walked through the doors, and Marusha was upset because no one would see the wonderful back of the dress."

So Miss Young, who had studied ballet as a child, asked for a retake in which she entered the set and pirouetted before walking toward the camera. Viewers loved it.

The show at first was an audacious step for her, since at the time a fearful Hollywood was attacking television, a new medium and a formidable rival. Miss Young said friends and advisers warned her that if she appeared on television regularly she would be "blackballed out of this business" and "never get another job." But she saw television as the "wave of the future," and signed a contract with NBC and Procter & Gamble to produce and star in the dramatic series.

Miss Young appeared in 165 episodes. A devout Catholic, she ended each show by delivering a homily to the audience. Her show extolled "respect for law and order and for disciplined deportment and character-building standards," she said in her 1961 memoir, "The Things I Had to Learn," written with Helen Ferguson. "Above all, we want to prove the strength, the good, really, of people."

Although critics derided the moralistic melodramas as "Sunday night soap opera," the series became one of the most popular on television, earning Miss Young millions of dollars and a reputation as one of the best businesswomen in Hollywood.

	The Associated Press
	Actress Loretta Young with comedian Danny Thomas, March 7, 1955, displaying their "Emmies" received from the Television Academy in Hollywood.

In 1972, she was awarded $559,000 by a jury in a breach-of-contract suit against NBC in which she contended that the network had humiliated her through the overseas release of introductory and closing segments of the show showing her in outmoded gowns and hairstyles.

She won the first of three Emmy Awards in 1953, which made her the first actress to win both an Oscar and an Emmy. The annual poll of TV-Radio Mirror readers earned her six consecutive gold medals as their favorite actress, and an episode of the series received the first television Grand Prix at the 1959 Cannes International Film Festival. The series was revived in 1962 as "The New Loretta Young Show" and ran for a year.

In 1995, Nostalgia Television, a national cable network, began reruns of the original show, the rights to which Miss Young had turned over to her son, Christopher Lewis, and his wife, Linda, who are film producers.

Perhaps the biggest controversy in her long career arose years after she left the screen. In 1994, her adopted daughter, Judy Lewis, maintained in an autobiography, "Uncommon Knowledge," that she was the daughter of Miss Young and Clark Gable and that she was conceived during the making of "Call of the Wild," in which the two starred.

In 1935 when the film was made, Miss Young was single and Gable was married to Ria Langham. Miss Lewis said that Miss Young was terrified that a scandal would end her career and Gable's, and that she had arranged to give birth in secret, taking more than a year off from work and citing an unspecified illness. Later, Miss Lewis asserted, Miss Young arranged her "adoption," retrieving her from an orphanage where she had been temporarily placed.

	The Associated Press
	Loretta Young in the film "Rachel and the Stranger," 1948.

For years, Miss Young refused to confirm or deny her daughter's account, dismissing it as "a rumor from a bygone era." After the book's release, mother and daughter did not speak to each other for months.

Mr. Brokaw said yesterday, "She didn't want to ever publicly acknowledge it."

Miss Young, whose given name was Gretchen Michaela, was born on Jan. 6, 1913, in Salt Lake City. When she was 2 her parents separated, and her mother moved with her daughters and son, Jack, to Hollywood. She borrowed $1,000 from a Roman Catholic bishop, persuaded a department store to let her have furniture on credit and opened a boardinghouse.

Miss Young attended a convent school and began appearing as a child extra in movies, often working with her older sisters, Polly Ann and Betty Jane.

First National Studio signed her to a contract at age 14, put braces on her teeth and renamed her Loretta, a change she gladly accepted as evidence that she was on her way to becoming a star.

In 1930, at 17, Miss Young eloped with Grant Withers, her co-star in the film "The Second-Story Murder." The marriage was annulled the following year. In 1940, she married Thomas H. A. Lewis, an advertising executive who later became a producer of her television series. The couple, who divorced in 1969, had two sons, Christopher, a producer, and Peter, a guitarist and songwriter.

Strong-willed, independent and rebellious, Miss Young was among the first female stars to command a six-figure salary. In 1939, when she rejected a five-year, $2 million contract with 20th Century Fox to try working as a freelance actress, she was blackballed by the studios. She made only one film, "Eternally Yours," with David Niven, during the next two years.

She owned the rights to "The Loretta Young Show" and had control over its content, casting and final editing. And she paid strict attention to the show's moral tone.

	The Associated Press
	Loretta Young, December 22, 1986.

During the filming for one episode, "Come to the Stable," about two nuns who come to the United States from France to build a hospital for children, Miss Young became so disturbed by swearing on the set that she came up with the idea of a "swear box." Cast and crew had to contribute up to 25 cents for each offense, and the money was donated to a home for unmarried mothers.

In 1963, at age 50, with movie offers still coming her way, Miss Young left show business. She later acknowledged that her retirement was perhaps premature and that she had always intended to resume her career. Although she was offered more than 150 parts, her last major role was that of an owner of a fashion magazine in "Lady in the Corner," a 1989 television drama.

She lived an almost reclusive life and was rarely interviewed or photographed, although she occasionally appeared in public to promote one of her favorite charities. Her later years were quietly shared with her third husband, Jean Louis, a designer for Columbia Pictures, whom she married in 1994. Mr. Louis won an Oscar of his own in 1956 for his designs for "The Solid Gold Cadillac."

Mr. Louis died in 1997. In addition to her sister, Mrs. Montalban, Miss Young is survived by her three children.

Miss Young said that her faith sustained her through the difficult times in her life and that her mother had given her an invaluable sense of worth, independence and flair. In her memoir, she wrote: "I believe that if we have lived our lives fully and well, and have accomplished, at least in part, the things which we were put here to do, we will be prepared -- mentally, spiritually and physically -- for our separation from this world."