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Myrna Loy: Roles
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Myrna Loy made her film debut in 1925 with the movie "What Price Beauty" and was soon engaged as a exotic seductress because of her remarkable beauty. For the time being she played only very small roles in the movies "The Caveman" (26), "The Gilded Highway" (26), "Exquisite Sinner" (26), "Satan in Sables" (26), "Don Juan" (26) and "Across the Pacific" (26).
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Myrna Loy (1905-1993) was born in Helena, Montana. She was initially type cast in silent films as an exotic femme-fatale, but went on to starring roles as a sophisticated, witty and intelligent woman.
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There, they caught the attention of Natacha Rambova, who was Mrs. Rudolph Valentino, and with her help Myrna landed a small part in What Price Beauty (1928), a film shot in 1925 and released three years later. Myrna first tested for the role as the virgin in the silent version of Ben Hur (1925), starring Ramon Novarro, but due to her unusual beauty she was cast instead as a mistress to a Roman senator. In roles to follow, Myrna was generally chosen to play an exotic Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Polynesian, or Filipino temptress, as well as gypsies, slave girls, and mysterious spies, and she decided to change her last name to the Asian-sounding Loy. The following year she won a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers Studios.
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After years of persuasion, in 1963 Myrna Loy eventually went into theatre, doing summer stock in New England. The play was Marriage-go-Round and Myrna was petrified. But it led to a whole new outlet for her talents and she appeared on stage often in later years. She made her Broadway debut in 1973 in a revival of 'The Women' She ... became a founder member of the American Place Theatre, a non-profit theatre set up to help new writers develop. She continued to work until a few years before her death on December 14th 1993. Like Cary Grant, she did not receive an Oscar for her roles in any of the movies she had made, but in 1990 she received and honorary Oscar in recognition of her "extraordinary qualities, both onscreen and off, with appreciation for a lifetime's worth of indelible performances". Myrna Loy packed so much into her life, and everything she did, she did with enthusiasm and love.
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Although she was typcast over and over again as a vamp, Myrna continued to stay busy with small parts. Finally, in 1927, she received star billing in BITTER APPLES. The excitement was short lived as she returned to the usual smaller roles afterward.
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By this time Loy was highly regarded for her performances in romantic comedies and she was anxious to demonstrate her dramatic ability, and was cast in the lead female role in The Rains Came (1939) opposite Tyrone Power. She filmed
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