Vanity Fair

Allied Pictures

I love that I share a birthday with fellow Montanan Myrna Loy (well I wasn't born there, but I lived there longer, so...it counts, right?) I adore Myrna Loy, shared birthday or not. She was an amazing actress who could present as a haughty beauty or a cute-as-a-button girl next door. She can make me laugh, as she's done through all the Thin Man movies, or drive me to tears as she does consistently with each viewing of one of the best movies ever made, The Best Years of Our Lives. And if you don't know anything about her films, stop right here!  Go find one on Turner Classic Movies and get back to me. You can thank me later.

But off screen she was admirable as well, advocating for better roles and treatment of minority actors and was such an outspoken anti-Fascist that Hitler banned her films in Germany. She probably didn't change the world with her opinions, but in the context of the times, she was brave to speak up at all. And she was independent. Yes, she married several times, but she was her own career woman, and I loved that about her and my other favorites: Katherine Hepburn and Ingrid Bergman. But before I really knew who she was, I simply knew she was someone famous with whom I shared a birthday. One such day, as was typical, the paper ran a list of famous people who had birthdays and I saw her name. I was maybe eight or nine and was a little young to have seen any of the hard drinking Thin Man movies quite yet, so I wasn't putting a face to the name so as Mom and I drove downtown to run errands I asked about her, specifically I wanted to know if she was beautiful. My mother's response was somewhat wistful. Usually a biting critic of anything or anyone she didn't agree with, there was a wisp of sadness in her voice instead when she assured me that, yes, she was very beautiful but was also very vain and struggled with aging gracefully. At the time of that question, Myrna Loy was about the same age I am now.

RKO Pictures

I've never forgotten that as I watched Myrna Loy films, and I thought about it a lot as I read her autobiography. Of course even if she was totally self-aware, which I don't get the impression that she was, she wasn't going to cop to being vain in her book, but there are hints that support my mother's statement. She protested a bit too much about the slim age difference between herself and co-star Teresa Wright in The Best Years of Her Lives, for example. Myrna plays the mother to Teresa's adult daughter role. 

She did play mother roles and was the aunt to Doris Day's character in Midnight Lace the same year I was born, but it is true she was reticent to accept those roles and her career slowed as she aged as a result. I have to accept that, as flawless as I find her acting, she was like all of us and flawed in other ways. And for someone who had spent her life making a name for herself with her beauty, watching that outer beauty fade must have indeed been hard. But perhaps because my fellow Leo struggled so much against a fight none of us wins, I'm determined not to be that way.  Maybe in a way Myrna Loy is why I write this blog.

Of course, never having been someone who could make a living with my face or body, it's easier for me right? Maybe, but next up, I'll tell you all the ways I'm an absolute hypocrite when I make the statement  that I'm embracing my age.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this classic scene from Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

My gift to all of you.