 |
| Alternate pose. |
A versatile, Academy Award-winning actress, strikingly beautiful, with large luminous eyes and sensuous lips. She had a lovely, distinctively modulated voice. She was elegant and looked wonderful in clothes. She had a long, varied, and distiguished career, and she aged gracefully and glamorously... and still, she's never interested me at all. I don't know what it is I find lacking in her... some sense of individuality, some spark? I love these portraits by Horst, but I'd love them just as much if they were only images of a pretty fashion model, with her fabulous lace-covered hat and blazing carnation.
***
Really quite beautiful and a bit of a clothes-horse, on-screen and off, she looked especially lovely in color.
 |
| Photograph by John Rawlings, 1941. |
This next gown is certainly interesting. She wore this to the Academy Awards cermony in 1948, when she won the best actress Oscar for her performance in "The Farmer's Daughter". It's very... green. It's slightly less alarming without the matching capelet.
***
 |
| With her daughter Judy. |
OK, here's something that makes her a little more interesting. Her daughter - her first child - was the result of an affair with Clark Gable, conceived while the two were on location together making "The Call of the Wild" in
1935. A famously devout, rather overbearing Catholic, Young had the child in secret and after a few months put her into an
orphanage. But then, when the baby was nineteen months old, Young made the pretense of
adopting her. Though rumors of her true parentage were always rampant in
Hollywood, Judy, herself, only became aware of the gossip on the eve of her own marriage. Later, several years after Gable's death, her mother, under duress, finally confessed that Judy was her biological daughter. Young only admitted the truth publicly - to her authorized biographer - a year before her death; the book was published posthumously.
