Trama

Using photographs and an off-screen narrator, this breezy biography takes us quickly through Myrna Loy's film career and ends with a salute to her charity work for the United Nations and on behalf of children. She grows up on a Montana ranch and goes to private high school and art school in Los Angeles. Rudolph Valentino and his wife become her patrons (she's a sculptor) then help get her first movie roles. She's soon cast as a vamp, changes studios a couple of times, stars with Hollywood's most famous leading men, and plays a wife in her most enduring roles, as Nora Charles and as Lillian Gilbreth.—<jhailey@hotmail.com>

Myrna Loy's screen persona of the majestic, elegant and often exotic belies the fact of being born and raised farm girl Myrna Williams near Helena, Montana. Her early career thoughts were to be an artist, her sculptures which attracted the attention of Rudolph Valentino, who ended up being her conduit into movie acting initially in bit parts. Her early leading roles under contract to Warner Bros. cast her as the siren. In the early 1930s, she moved from Warner Bros. to freelance, before settling with M-G-M then Paramount. She is perhaps most famous for La cena de los acusados (1934) - which spawned several sequels - where she and her co-star William Powell were seen as the perfect screen couple. That view of the pair may have only been eclipsed by a late career pairing with Clifton Webb as her screen husband.—Huggo