Loretta Young's Oscar Dress
It's a divisive Oscar win, but let's focus on the dress Loretta Young was wearing the night she won Best Actress for The Farmer's Daughter.
"And as for you," she said, looking at her Oscar, "at long last!"
Have there been many audible gasps at the Oscars when a winner's name is announced? Aside from the very obvious, very recent snafu where Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as Best Picture instead of Moonlight?
Well, one night it did happen was the night in 1948 where Fredric March (the previous year's Best Actor winner) announced that the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role went to...Loretta Young for The Farmer's Daughter instead of Rosalind Russell for Mourning Becomes Electra, a performance so widely praised and expected to win that people were already leaving the auditorium as the winner was being announced.
Needless to say, they all stopped in their tracks when they heard Loretta Young's name announced instead.
According to a Loretta Young biography, Rosalind Russell called up Loretta the morning of the Oscars and asked if she was nervous. Loretta replied, "Not really. I’m just happy to be one of the five, and wear this beautiful Adrian dress."
So let's talk about that dress, because it's certainly stunning. There's a lot of it, and there's more than what she wore on stage collecting her statue. It also came with a removable turtleneck that looks like something Lady Gaga might wear on stage someday.
In the pantheon of Oscar dresses, Loretta's is kind of like the godmother of Joanne Woodward's, also a voluminous green gown, or Grace Kelly's, with the delicate straps. It ranks up there pretty highly on my personal best dressed list.
Loretta's dress was designed by noted costume designer Adrian, who designed the costumes for films like The Wizard of Oz, The Women, The Philadelphia Story, Susan and God, and The Great Ziegfeld, among others. Outrageously, perhaps, he was never nominated for his own Oscar.
Back to Loretta's win. During her phone conversation with Rosalind, she reportedly shot down any suggestions by Rosalind that she'd win (a straw poll in a movie magazine had already shown her what the public thought of her performance compared to the rest of the field: she came in dead last), telling her, "You deserve it, and you’re going to win it. I’ll see you tonight.”
Well, Loretta's name was called as winner, and Rosalind, who'd been in the midst of standing, according to Hedda Hopper, to walk to the stage, turned that into leading the rest of the audience into a standing ovation for an actress who'd been working in Hollywood since just about the dawn of film.
Loretta walked up to collect her Oscar and gave, what I think, is one of the most charming speeches ever. She tapped the microphone and said, "That's my heart. You know, up until now, presentations of the Academy Awards has been a purely spectator sport for me. However, tonight I, uh, dressed for the stage just in case."
That's quite a dress -- thank you for sharing this!
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