At the Academy Awards ceremony of 1947, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Rosalind Russell would win the Oscar for best actress, for Mourning Becomes Electra. But when the envelope was opened, out came the name of Loretta Young. There was an gasp from the audience.
Nobody was more surprised than Loretta Young herself, then aged 35, as she made her way up to the stage. All she could say, on receiving the Oscar for her part in The Farmer's Daughter, was "At long last", an understandable comment from a woman who had been in the business so long: she made her first screen appearance at the age of four.
Loretta Young, who died on August 12th aged 87, was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and was three when her parents separated and her mother moved with her five children to Hollywood, where she opened a boarding house.
A year later, the child appeared in The Only Way (1917), paid $3.50 a day for playing a patient weeping on the operating table. At eight, she and her siblings were Arab children in the Rudolph Valentino film, The Sheik (1921).
At 14, while at convent school, she returned to the screen in a supporting role in Naughty But Nice (1927). The studio thought her real name, Gretchen, "sounded too Dutchy", and changed it to Loretta, the favourite saint of the star of the film, Coleen Moore.
Loretta Young often took herself for her saintly namesake, irritating her colleagues. While working on The Stranger (1945), there was a scene where she was supposed to walk off with Orson Welles instead of attending Sunday morning Mass. But as a devout Catholic, she refused to be shown on screen dodging church. Reluctantly, Welles changed it to another day of the week. But saint she was not. She was married three times and divorced twice, and had affairs with, among others, George Brent, Clark Gable (said to be the father of her "adopted" daughter), David Niven, Joseph Mankiewicz, William Wellman and Spencer Tracy. Wellman and the married Tracy came to blows over her. Of their off-screen romance, she remarked: "Since Spence and I were both Catholic, and can never be married, we have agreed not to see each other any more."
In 1930, she had eloped with co-star Grant Withers. The marriage was annulled the following year, with Withers describing her as "a steel butterfly".
When Columbia mogul, Harry Cohn, refused to pay $300 for a dress she had bought for her role in Bedtime Story (1942), she made herself available only for night-time fittings, adding to the budget.
Virginia Field, with whom she worked on Eternally Yours, commented: "She was and is the only actress I really dislike. She was sickeningly sweet, a pure phoney. Her two faces sent me home angry and crying."
But Loretta Young was physically exquisite, and had a genuine touch of class. She started as a Hollywood leading lady in Laugh Clown, Laugh (1928). The director, Herbert Brenon, who had tested 48 other girls for the role, told her: "Your legs can be padded. Likewise your body. It's your eyes that are getting you the part."
When she moved to Fox in 1934, the head of the studio, Darryl F. Zanuck decided she was ideal for period pieces. She played Robert Clive's wife in Clive Of India (1935) and the Empress Eugenie in Suez (1938). The Farmer's Daughter was followed by the title roles in the comedy The Bishop's Wife (1947) and as the 1820 bondswoman in Rachel And The Stranger (1948). Her career petered out in the early 1950s, to be revived by her long-running TV show. After her divorce in 1968 from producer/writer Thomas Lewis, with whom she had two children, she wrote a syndicated lonely-hearts column in Catholic newspapers. At 81 she married costume designer Jean Louis (he did her famous TV show frocks), who died three years ago.
She devoted herself to Catholic charities in the 1980s, selling her Hollywood home and jewels to finance her work. "They are the luxuries of life. If selling a bracelet will help feed children, that is what I want to do," she explained. She might have been making some progress at last towards her canonisation.
Loretta (Gretchen Michaela) Young: born 1913; died, August 2000