Myrna Loy played women who were married and liked it, which almost nobody else on screen in the 1930s managed. She listened better than she talked, and gave William Powell, across fourteen films, somebody worth being clever for.
Fi1m perspective
Halfway through The Thin Man (1934) Nick Charles lies on a sofa and shoots the baubles off the Christmas tree with the air gun his wife has given him. Watch Nora. Loy does not scold and does not applaud. She watches him the way you watch a man you chose and would choose again, and she is plainly working out how to get herself onto the case he has just refused. Wives in detective pictures nagged or trembled. Nora wanted in, said so, and the film took her side.
That is what Loy did that other actors did not. She played women who were married and had not stopped enjoying it, and she played the enjoyment as a form of attention. She listened more than she talked, and when she talked it was over the top of Powell, the two of them sounding like people who had given up being polite years ago and had not yet given up being interested. We expected to admire the banter and were instead rather moved by how much these two like each other; it is in the pauses she leaves for him, exactly long enough to be generous and not so long as to be dutiful.
She had been in pictures for a decade before anyone let her do it. From the mid-1920s she was cast as vamps and exotic villainesses, The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) among them, and by her own count it took some eighty films before The Thin Man made her. Arrowsmith (1931) is the before: she arrives late as Joyce Lanyon, in handsome clothes, and is handed nothing to do in them. Three years on she was carrying a film.
Powell is the collaborator who matters. They made fourteen films together, six of them as the Charleses, and Libeled Lady (1936) put them in a four-hander with Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy. W. S. Van Dyke directed five of her films at his usual speed, and the speed suited her, because her best effects are reactions caught on the way past, not speeches. She served with the Red Cross during the war and worked less afterwards, though the capable wife came back for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948).
The cost was the label. Once she was the perfect wife nobody wrote her anything else, and she knew it. "Labels limit you, because they limit your possibilities," she said, and the later credits bear her out. We have not seen enough of her dramatic work to say how much was lost, and it is a fair complaint that the comedies asked her only to be unflappable. But unflappable is a hard thing to act, and she never let the effort show. Start with The Thin Man. The dog is good. She is better.
Biography
Myrna Loy was an American actress. Born Myrna Adele Williams on 2 August 1905 in Montana, she trained as a dancer before turning to acting and appeared in minor roles in silent films. She was initially typecast in exotic or vamp roles, often as a woman of Asian descent.
Her breakthrough came with the role of Nora Charles in The Thin Man (1934). She was frequently paired with William Powell, and the two appeared together in 14 films, including five further Thin Man pictures. Loy continued to work in film, stage and television into later decades. During the Second World War she served with the Red Cross.
Although never nominated for a competitive Academy Award, she received an honorary Oscar in 1991 for her body of work. She died on 14 December 1993.
