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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Filmography
- Cupid's Rustler (1924)
- Young Ideas (1924)
- All Wet (1924) (short subject)
- The Haunted Honeymoon (1925) (short subject)
- Dangerous Innocence (1925)
- The Burning Trail (1925)
- The Teaser (1925)
- The Plastic Age (1925)
- Crook Buster (1925) (short subject)
- WAMPAS Baby Stars of 1926 (1926) (short subject)
- The Beautiful Cheat (1926)
- The Johnstown Flood (1926)
- Oh What a Nurse! (1926)
- Ridin' for Love (1926) (short subject)
- Skinner's Dress Suit (1926)
- Fade Away Foster (1926) (short subject)
- The Shamrock Handicap (1926)
- The Galloping Cowboy (1926)
- The Fire Barrier (1926) (short subject)
- The Man in the Saddle (1926)
- Don't Shoot (1926) (short subject)
- Pep of the Lazy J (1926) (short subject)
- The Blue Eagle (1926)
- The Midnight Kiss (1926)
- The Return of Peter Grimm (1926)
- Martin of the Mounted (1926) (short subject)
- Lazy Lightning (1926)
- The Stolen Ranch (1926)
- 45 Minutes from Hollywood (1926) (short subject)
- Seventh Heaven (1927)
- The Horse Trader (1927) (short subject)
- Two Girls Wanted (1927)
- Sunrise (1927)
- Street Angel (1928)
- 4 Devils (1928)
- Lucky Star (1929)
- Happy Days (1929)
- Christina (1929)
- Sunny Side Up (1929)
- High Society Blues (1930)
- The Man Who Came Back (1931)
- Daddy Long Legs (1931)
- Merely Mary Ann (1931)
- Delicious (1931)
- The First Year (1932)
- Tess of the Storm Country (1932)
- State Fair (1933)
- Adorable (1933)
- Paddy the Next Best Thing (1933)
- Carolina (1934)
- The Cardboard City (1934) (Cameo)
- Change of Heart (1934)
- Servants' Entrance (1934)
- One More Spring (1935)
- The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935)
- Small Town Girl (1936)
- Ladies in Love (1936)
- A Star Is Born (1937)
- Three Loves Has Nancy (1938)
- The Young in Heart (1938)
- Meet the Stars #2: Baby Stars (1941) (short subject)
- Bernardine (1957)
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].
External links
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