Janet Gaynor
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| Janet Gaynor | |
 |
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| Birth name | Laura Gainor |
| Born | October 6, 1906 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA |
| Died | September 14, 1984 Palm Springs, California, USA |
| Academy Awards |
Best Actress 1928 Seventh Heaven |
Janet Gaynor [1] (October 6, 1906 – September 14, 1984) was an American actress who, in 1928, became the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress.
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[edit] Early life
Born Laura Gainor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, her family moved west to San Francisco, California when she was just a child. When graduated from high school in 1923, Gaynor decided to pursue a career in acting. She then moved to Los Angeles, California, where she supported herself working in a shoe store, receiving $18 per week. She managed to land unbilled small parts in several feature films and comedy shorts for two years. Finally, in 1926, at the age of 20, she was cast in the lead role in a silent film called The Johnstown Flood, the same year she was selected as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars. Her outstanding performance won her the attention of producers, who cast her in a series of films.
[edit] Rising career
Within one year, Gaynor was one of Hollywood's leading ladies. Her performances in Seventh Heaven (the first of twelve movies she would make with actor Charles Farrell) and both Sunrise and Street Angel (in 1927, also with Charles Farrell) earned her the first Academy Award for Best Actress in 1928. It was the only time in Oscar history that the award was given for multiple roles: it was given on the basis of the actor's total work over the year, and not just for one particular performance.
Gaynor was one of only a handful of leading ladies who made a successful transition to sound movies over the next decade. And for a number of years, Gaynor was the leading actress of the Fox studios and was treated accordingly with top billing and the choice of prime roles. However, when Darryl F. Zanuck merged his fledgling studio, 20th Century, with Fox, her status became precarious and even tertiary to that of actresses Loretta Young and Shirley Temple. She managed to terminate her contract with the studio and achieved acclaim in films produced by David O. Selznick in the mid-1930s.
In 1937, she was again nominated for an Academy Award, this time for her role in A Star Is Born. After appearing in The Young in Heart, she left film industry for nearly twenty years, returning one last time in 1957 as Pat Boone's mother in Bernardine.
[edit] Death
She died in 1984, at the age of 77, partly as the aftermath of a traffic accident in San Francisco in which a driver running a red light crashed into her taxi, killing one of the passengers, and injuring the rest, including her husband, Paul Gregory, and her long-time companion, Mary Martin. Gaynor never fully recovered from the accident.
She was interred in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California.
[edit] Posthumous allegations
After Boze Hadleigh's 1996 book Conversations with 10 Hollywood Lesbians, it was claimed that Janet Gaynor and Mary Martin had had an intimate long-term lesbian relationship. Many gay or lesbian actors and actresses were forced to hide their sexuality by making sham marriages during Hollywood's early years, and it was not uncommon for stars to later have it revealed that they had led secret sexual lives. [2] [3] [4]
In Hadleigh's 1994 book Hollywood Babble On (ISBN#1-55972-219-3), actor Robert Cummings is quoted as saying regarding Gaynor and Mary Martin: "Janet Gaynor's husband was Adrian, the MGM fashion designer. But her wife was Mary Martin..." It should, however, be noted that neither Gaynor nor Martin were interviewed for the book nor were either alive at the time of its publication.
[edit] Filmography
- 1926 The Blue Eagle
- 1926 The Johnstown Flood
- 1926 The Midnight Kiss
- 1926 The Return of Peter Grimm
- 1926 The Shamrock Handicap
- 1927 Seventh Heaven (Academy Award for Best Actress)
- 1927 Sunrise (Academy Award for Best Actress)
- 1927 Two Girls Wanted
- 1928 Four Devils
- 1928 Street Angel (Academy Award for Best Actress)
- 1929 Christina
- 1929 Happy Days
- 1929 Lucky Star
- 1929 Sunny Side Up
- 1930 High Society Blues
- 1931 Daddy Long Legs
- 1931 Delicious
- 1931 The Man Who Came Back
- 1931 Merely Mary Ann
- 1932 The First Year
- 1932 Tess of the Storm Country
- 1933 Adorable
- 1933 Paddy the Next Best Thing
- 1933 State Fair
- 1934 Carolina
- 1934 Change of Heart
- 1934 La Ciudad de Carton
- 1934 Servant's Entrance
- 1935 The Farmer Takes a Wife
- 1935 One More Spring
- 1936 Ladies in Love
- 1936 Small Town Girl/One Horse Town
- 1937 A Star Is Born
- 1938 Three Loves Has Nancy
- 1938 The Young in Heart
- 1957 Bernardine
[edit] Trivia
- Gaynor was not only the first, but until 1986 (when Marlee Matlin won her Oscar), she was also the youngest actress to win an Academy Award for Best Actress.
- The Brazilian press has reported that Gaynor and Mary Martin briefly lived with their respective husbands in the state of Goiás in the 1950s and 1960s[5]. Apparently, both women lived in farms close to the city of Anápolis[6].
| Preceded by: — |
Academy Award for Best Actress 1928 for Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise |
Succeeded by: Mary Pickford for Coquette |
