Wings in the Dark

Myrna Loy was born Myrna Adele Williams in Helena, Montana, in 1905 and spent her first Hollywood decade, from the mid-1920s, typecast as an exotic vamp, often playing Asian or Eurasian femmes fatales under contract to Warner Bros. and later MGM. The role that remade her, Nora Charles in W. S. Van Dyke's The Thin Man (1934) opposite William Powell, recast her overnight as the screen's ideal of a witty, unflappable, equal-partner wife — a persona she repeated across five Thin Man sequels through 1947 and that MGM's own publicity dubbed her "the perfect wife," a label she found both useful and confining. She and Grant appeared together three times, spanning most of both their careers. The first was the aviation melodrama Wings in the Dark (1935), early in Grant's Paramount period. The other two came after the war, in comedies that traded on the domestic persona she had built: The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947), with Shirley Temple, and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), in which Loy and Grant play a New York couple undone by a disastrous country-house renovation. Loy's other major credit of the period, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), cast her as a wife adjusting to a husband's return from war, extending the same emotional intelligence that made the Thin Man pictures work. She was never nominated for a competitive Academy Award during her working life, a gap widely regarded within the industry as an oversight; the Academy corrected it in 1991 with an Honorary Award. Off screen, Loy was active politically and civically: she worked with the Red Cross during the Second World War and later served as a United States delegate to UNESCO. She died in New York in 1993.