Charlie’s Hollywood Star-of-the-Week: Janet Gaynor

A weekly feature in which my four-year-old son is let loose on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles, and chooses a star from among the more than 2,500 honorees. His “random” picks sometimes reveal unexplained connections such as the summer day in 2012 when he sat down on the star of actress Celeste Holm and refused to budge. We later learned that the Oscar-winning actress had died only hours earlier.

Continuing his three-week obsession with the silent movie goddesses of the 1920s, Charlie picked sweet Janet Gaynor this week on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Or maybe he was just gearing up for the upcoming Academy Awards since Gaynor has the distinction of being the very first recipient of the Best Actress Oscar. She won the honor for three films: Seventh Heaven, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, and Street Angel, but was the only actress ever to win an Academy Award for multiple film roles since the Motion Picture Academy quickly changed the rules.

Born on October 6, 1906 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, Gaynor arrived in Los Angeles in 1923. She quickly got work in movies, but only in very small parts. Her first leading role was in The Johnstown Flood, a 1926 film that told the story of the Great Flood of 1889 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania that claimed for than 2,200 lives. The film also  marked one of the first screen appearances of both Clark Gable and Carole Lombard in small, uncredited roles.

I’ve had the chance to see all three of the films for which Gaynor won her Best Actress award, and let me tell you, she really deserved it. Frank Borzage’s Seventh Heaven and Street Angel, both co-starring Janet’s frequent on-screen partner Charles Farrell, and especially F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, co-starring George O’Brien, will change any biases you may have against silent movies. They are wonderful films and Gaynor is magnificent in all three.

But just as Gaynor’s popularity was rising, sound movies were coming in and Janet was one of the few big stars who made the transition with ease. She appeared in films such as State Fair (1933) with Will Rogers, The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935) with Henry Fonda, and Ladies in Love (1937) with Tyrone Power. But the actress is probably best known today for her role as Esther Blodgett/Vicki Lester in the 1937 version of William Wellman’s A Star Is Born, the film about an up-an-coming actress whose fame eclipses that of her superstar husband Norman Maine (played here by Frederic March) whose career is nose-diving. This is the story that was later remade by Judy Garland (1954) and Barbra Streisand (1976).  Gaynor received her second Best Actress nomination for this wildly entertaining film.

Despite her success, Gaynor grew weary of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1930s. After only a few more films she married famed costume designer Adrian (The Wizard of Oz, The Women) in 1939 and all but retired from the screen (making only one more film — the forgettable Pat Boone musical Bernardine years later in 1957). Though Adrian (born Adrian Adolph Greenberg) was openly gay, the two stayed married until his death in 1959 and had a son together, Robin, born in 1940. Following Adrian’s death, Janet married producer Paul Gregory but rumors of her own sexuality and her long-term close friendship with actress Mary Martin were rampant. In 1982, Janet and Mary were involved in a car accident in San Francisco in which Gaynor was seriously injured. She died two years later due to complications from that accident on September 14, 1984.

I love Gaynor’s performance in A Star Is Born, but I urge you, if you get the chance, to check out her exquisite work in some of the best silent movies of the 1920s.