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Janet Gaynor

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Janet Gaynor
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Janet Gaynor

Janet Gaynor [link] (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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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 US$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 revelations

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 actor and actresses were forced to hide their sexuality by making sham marriages. This would explain why Gaynor had three husbands over a period of several years. ([link], [link], [link], [link]).

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 was interviewed for the book or was even still alive at the time of its publication.

Filmography

Trivia

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