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Loretta Young is a Actor, Director and Scriptwriter American born on 6 january 1913 at Salt Lake City (USA)

Loretta Young

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Birth name Gretchen Young
Nationality USA
Birth 6 january 1913 at Salt Lake City (USA)
Death 12 august 2000 (at 87 years) at Los Angeles (USA)
Awards Academy Award for Best Actress

Gretchen Michaela "Loretta" Young (January 6, 1913 – August 12, 2000) was an American actress. Starting as a child actress, she had a long and varied career in film from 1917 to 1953. She won the 1948 best actress Academy Award for her role in the 1947 film The Farmer's Daughter, and received an Oscar nomination for her role in Come to the Stable, in 1949. Young moved to the relatively new medium of television, where she had a dramatic anthology series, The Loretta Young Show, from 1953 to 1961. The series earned three Emmy Awards, and reran successfully on daytime TV and later in syndication. In the 1980s Young returned to the small screen and won a Golden Globe in Christmas Eve in 1986. Young, a devout Roman Catholic, worked with various Catholic charities after her acting career.

Biography

Young was married to actor Grant Withers from 1930 to 1931. She married producer Tom Lewis in 1940 and they divorced very bitterly in the mid-1960s; Lewis died in 1988. They had two sons, Peter Lewis (of the San Francisco rock band Moby Grape), and Christopher Lewis, a film director. She married fashion designer Jean Louis in 1993. Louis died in 1997. Young was godmother to Marlo Thomas (daughter of TV star Danny Thomas).

Clark Gable affair
In 1935, Young had a flirtation with then-married Clark Gable, while the actors were working on The Call of the Wild. (Gable was married to Maria "Ria" Franklin Prentiss Lucas Langham.) In 1998, she reportedly told her daughter-in-law that she had been date raped by Gable. Afterword, Young became pregnant, but due to the moral codes placed on the film industry, Young covered up her pregnancy in order to avoid damaging her career (as well as Gable's). When the pregnancy began to show, she went on a "vacation" to England, and several months later returned to California. Shortly before the birth, she gave an interview from her bed, covered in blankets, stating that her long movie absence was due to a condition she'd had since childhood. Young gave birth to Judith Young on November 6, 1935, in a house that she and her mother owned in Venice, California. Three weeks later, she returned to movie making. After several months of living in the house in Venice, Judy was transferred to St. Elizabeth's, an orphanage outside Los Angeles. When she was 19 months old, her grandmother picked her up and Young announced to gossip columnist Louella Parsons that she had adopted the infant. Few in Hollywood were fooled by the ruse, and the child's true parentage was widely rumored in entertainment circles. Young refused to confirm or comment publicly on the rumors until 1999, when Joan Wester Anderson wrote Young's authorized biography. In her interviews with Anderson for the book, Young finally confessed that Judy was her biological child and the product of Young having had a brief affair with Gable. The child was raised as "Judy Lewis", taking the last name of Young's second husband, producer Tom Lewis.

According to Judy Lewis's autobiography Uncommon Knowledge, some people made fun of her because of the prominent ears she had inherited from her father. She states that at seven she had an operation to "pin back" her large ears and that her mother always had her wear bonnets as a child. In 1958, Lewis' future husband Joseph Tinney told her "everybody" knew that Gable was her biological father. The only time Lewis remembered Gable visiting her was once at her home when she was a teenager; she had no idea he was her biological father. Several years later he appeared on The Loretta Young Show after Young had been in hospital for several months. Lewis was an assistant and was right behind her mother when she noticed Gable. They never had a relationship and she never saw him again. Several years later, after becoming a mother herself, Lewis finally confronted her mother, who privately admitted the truth, stating that Judy was "a walking mortal sin".

Loretta Young's daughter-in-law Linda Lewis, wife of Young's son Christopher, said the family stayed silent about the date rape claim until after both Loretta Young and her daughter Judy Lewis had died. The claim was reported in an article in BuzzFeed by Anne Helen Petersen in July 2015.

Politics
Young was a lifelong Republican. In 1952, she appeared in radio, print, and magazine ads in support of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and was in attendance at his inauguration along with Anita Louise, Louella Parsons, Jane Russell, Dick Powell, June Allyson, and Lou Costello, among others. In both 1968 and 1980 she was a vocal supporter of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. She was also an active member of the Hollywood Republican Committee with close friend Irene Dunne as well as Ginger Rogers, William Holden, George Murphy, Fred Astaire, and John Wayne.