Want to know the best Loretta Young movies? How about the worst Loretta Young movies? Curious about Loretta Young box office grosses or which Loretta Young movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Loretta Young movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information. This page comes from a request from SteinHoF16 and Chris.
Loretta Young (1913-2000) was an Oscar®-winning American actress. Young started her career acting in silent movies in uncredited roles when she was only 4 years old. By the time she was 20 she was already a movie star with over 40 IMDb acting credits. Loretta Young’s IMDb page shows 107 acting credits from 1917-1989. This page will rank 70 Loretta Young movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television roles, shorts, documentaries and numerous movies before 1933 were not included in the rankings. But every movie movie she made from 1934 to 1953 is included.
Loretta Young Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Loretta Young movies by co-stars of her movies
- Sort Loretta Young movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Loretta Young movies by domestic yearly box office rank
- Sort Loretta Young movies by how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Loretta Young movie received.
- Sort Loretta Young movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
- Blue link in Co-star column takes you to that star’s UMR movie page
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Loretta Young Table
- Twenty-six Loretta Young movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 37.14% of her movies listed. Suez (1938) was her biggest box office hit.
- An average Loretta Young movie grosses $93.20 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 48 Loretta Young movies are rated as good movies…or 68.57% of her movies. The Stranger (1946) is her highest rated movie while Born To Be Bad (1934) is her lowest rated movie.
- Twelve Loretta Young movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 17.14% of her movies.
- Three Loretta Young movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 4.28% of her movies.
- An average “good movie” Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 60.00. 50 Loretta Young movie scored higher that average….or 71.42% of her movies. The Bishop’s Wife (1947) got the the highest UMR Score while Born To Be Bad (1934) got the lowest UMR Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Loretta Young
- Gretchen Young was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1913.
2. At the age of 3, Loretta Young’s family moved to Hollywood. She and her two sisters quickly became child thespians.
3. During Loretta Young’s high-school years, she was educated at Ramona Convent Secondary School. She was signed to a contract by John McCormick, the husband and manager of the actress Colleen Moore, who saw the young girl’s potential. The forename Loretta was given to her by Moore, who later explained it was the name of her favorite doll.
4. Loretta Young was voted America’s Sweetheart of the 1930s.
5. Loretta Young Had an illegitimate daughter by Clark Gable. For years, this was covered up in Hollywood, and was presented as an adoption. The daughter’s resemblance to both parents is uncanny. The daughter Judy Lewis later dabbled in acting before becoming a psychologist. Judy Lewis wrote a book “Uncommon Knowledge” with the truth of her parentage.
6. Country singer Loretta Lynn was named after Loretta Young.
7. Loretta Young was married three times. She had three children.
8. Loretta Young was close friends with: Rosalind Russell, Irene Dunne, Jane Wyman, Eddie Albert, James Stewart, David Niven, Danny Thomas, John Wayne, and Mr. and Mrs. Ronald Reagan. Bet those were some fun game nights!
9. Loretta Young had a low tolerance for foul language, so much in fact that whenever she went to set she brought with her a “swear box”. Her swear box was used to hold money from cast and crew members who swore within her presence who in return would put money in the box. Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Mitchum put large sums of money in the swear box on a regular basis telling Young that the amount deposited would cover them for the day.
10. After her film career slowed down….Loretta Young turned her attention to television. The Loretta Young Show was very successful….staying on air from 1953 to 1961.
Check out Loretta Young‘s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
Adjusted Worldwide Grosses on a few Loretta Young Movies
| Hatchet Man (1932) | $143,636,484.00 |
| Eternally Yours (1939) | $134,293,718.00 |
| Ladies Courageous (1944) | $101,183,789.00 |
| Taxi (1932) | $66,750,740.00 |
| Kismet (1930) | $63,756,024.00 |
| Shanghai (1935) | $54,591,536.00 |
| The Man from Blankley’s (1930) | $49,679,987.00 |
| Loose Ankles (1930) | $49,128,017.00 |
| Employees’ Entrance (1933) | $48,582,847.00 |
| Born To Be Bad (1934) | $46,674,732.00 |
| Play Girl (1932) | $40,772,731.00 |
| I Like Your Nerve (1931) | $39,428,568.00 |
| Cause for Alarm! (1951) | $39,365,491.00 |
| The Truth About Youth (1930) | $38,777,983.00 |
| The Forward Pass (1929) | $36,518,664.00 |
| The Careless Age (1929) | $33,652,848.00 |
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Hey Bob
1. Oh….I thought your previous comment was because of Dan’s comment…..now I know it was Joel’s fine movie thoughts on Loretta Young….lol.
2. Good stats on her billing from the mid 1930s to the end of her movie career.
3. I am starting to get a decent amount of Best Actress Oscar winners completed…..I should update the links on those Oscar pages. Oscar season will be done in 4 days.
4. Her show seems to have been a huge success. It makes me wonder who the Loretta Young is today…..somebody who had lots of hits, success on tv…..yet will be forgotten in time.
5. Candidates for my question in #4…..Jennifer Aniston, Jessica Lange or dare I say Julia Roberts…Roberts was huge….but has no standing with the middle schoolers I work with each day.
6. Glad our page got you to remember fondly your aunts……and thanks for the vote up.
1 HI BIG BOY I was by the way very amused by the swear box story in the Loretta Interesting Facts. My Deanna would have had to contribute heavily to that box if they had co-starred as verbatim conversations of hers that I’ve seen quoted would not have been taken from scripts of any of DD’s “girl next door” flicks !!
2 She was in fact surprisingly very frank and “open” in her private conversations. In the only interview she ever gave after quitting Hollywood Deanna told the great author/historian David Shipman according to him “Up until the day I left home for Hollywood it was drummed into me by my parents that I was never to go too far in a relationship with a man until I was married. However on leaving home, the very next day I arrived in a place were a completely different set of rules existed!”
3 Deanna had of course a lovely singing voice but still couldn’t fully win there because foul-mouthed next-door neighbour W C Fields complained about her practicing her singing within his hearing in the mornings.
4 My Jimmy turned down the Peter Finch role in the 1977 Network because of the bad language in the script. The 1991 Danny DeVito film Other People’s Money was riddled with bad language with Danny speaking little else but noticeably the only persons not to utter one foul word in it were old-time Hollywood stars my Greg and Piper Laurie. 1950s actress Debra Paget publicly castigated the language used in today’s movies.
5 The Great Ones have of course always been able to dictate the terms. Mae West is said to have been a fanatical non-smoker and had displayed all over her home including the rest-rooms NO SMOKING signs. But Mae apparently on the other hand loved her booze and one wit at the time threatened revenge by inviting her to a party at his own home and plastering the place with NO DRINKING signs!
Hey Bob….good trivia about your “Deanna”. As well the stories on your “Jimmy” and Mae West. You are right….the Great Ones can dictate the terms. Good feedback.
HI BRUCE
1 I was as I say surprised by Durbin’s openness with Shipman. When she told David about Hollywood rules on the boundaries concerning love and romance being different from those of her parents she indicated to him that she didn’t object to the Hollywood ones because her next words were “It was nice to be asked and to say no – or even yes at times.”
2 Thank you also for your interesting feedback on my other Loretta post today
Good stuff Bob. I will have to check out that Shipman/Durbin conversation.
HI BRUCE
1 “You should check out the Shipman interview with DD as it is good reading in its own right. You will have heard the expression “A poor man’s[ this or that]” To me Shipman is a RICH man’s Joel Hirschhorn!
2 If you do catch up on the interview you will see that without altering Deanna’s meaning I have substituted one or two of her words because I didn’t want to repeat them on your site. As I say a frank woman though she was by my reckoning about 61 whe she spoke to David Shipman and times had moved on from her heyday
1 Who cares about the spammers? When Hurricane Joel strikes this site on a new page I am usually in shock for a few days afterwards [and may even sulk] and I therefore wait until I have calmed down so I can digest with a clear mind what YOU have to say.
2 Thus I waited until yesterday to go over the detail of the Loretta page but then made up for lost time by spending a good part of the day mulling over your stats table and I must record that I am very impressed as I never realised that she had quite such a prolific career.
3 Moreover since 1936 anyway until her retirement from the screen in 1953 in every film in which she appeared but one she was the leading lading and always billed 1st or 2nd. Indeed in 27 of the 39 flicks she made in that period she was 1st billed and certainly it was not a “come down” to be listed 2nd in shared star billing with the male Giants who for the most part were her co-stars in the other 12 – Cooper, Grant, Robinson, Power [3 out of 4 times] Gable and Laddie. Accordingly even if you had wanted to you had no scope to Split from your normal high standards and artificially pad out her grosses!
4 As indicated [whilst she did make a couple of TV movies at the end of the 1980s] Loretta’s big screen movie career ended in 1953 but she consolidated her legend by moving straight into the highly successful Loretta Young show [1953-61] that you mention] and I’ve said before how my aunts who immigrated to the US in the 50s used to on return visits here rave about Loretta’s fashion parades on her show.
5 Now here’s the thing. Because of the nostalgic aunts connection I think that I have long been on the lookout for a Young page on this site more than I have most other performers missing from your index in the past year so I warmly welcome the new page with a Lensman “Vote up!”
BRUCE
1 I forgot to say that after Loretta Young the other actress that I have been most on the lookout for in the Cogerson index has been Bruce Willis-Moore ‘ ex better half.
2 I never warmed much to her as a persona on the screen itself but she had a very prominent and lucrative big screen career in the 90s and the puritan movie buff in me is always academically keenly interested in profiles of stars with successful careers.
3 Certainly as your site has always prided itself on an artist’s’ artistic/box office success taking precedence over [within reason of course] the person’s personal life it is to be hoped that the omission so far of the former head of the Moore-Willis household does not arise from your taking sides in a divorce!
Hey Bob….I have thought a few times of putting out a Demi Moore page……but she always gets dropped when it gets time to showtime…..but one day she will have her own UMR page. She is somebody that has starred with two of my three favorite actors….Michael Caine in Blame it on Rio and Flawless…..and Bruce Willis in Mortal Thoughts, Beavis and Butthead and Charlie’s Angels Full Throttle. So one day you will see her very own page here.