Janet Gaynor

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Janet Gaynor [1] (October 6, 1906 – September 14, 1984) was an actress who, in 1928, was the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Actress.

1 Early life
2 Rising career
3 Death
4 Posthumous revelations
5 Filmography
6 External links

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Early life

Born Laura Gainor in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, her family moved west to San Francisco, California when she was a child. Upon graduating from high school, Gaynor decided to pursue a career in acting. For two years, she supported herself with odd jobs in Los Angeles, California while taking minor roles in films. Finally, in 1926, the redhaired actress 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.

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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. In 1937, she was again nominated for an Academy Award, this time for her role in A Star Is Born. Soon afterwards, despite the success of the film and the acclaim for her performance, she left film for nearly twenty years, returning one last time in 1957 in the Pat Boone vehicle, Bernardine.

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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.

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Posthumous revelations

After Boze Hadleigh's 1996 book Conversations with 10 Hollywood Lesbians, it emerged, although neither Gaynor nor Mary Martin were interviewees, or even still alive, that the pair had had an intimate longterm lesbian relationship, despite husbands and children, over a period of several years. Confirmed by ([[2]], [[3]], [[4]], [[5]]).

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..."

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