Want to know the best Myrna Loy (1905-1993) movies? How about the worst Myrna Loy movies? Curious about Myrna box office grosses or which Myrna Loy movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Myrna Loy movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
At the suggestion of Robwrite, I began researching Myrna Loy’s career about two months ago for this movie page. My knowledge of Myrna Loy was pretty much limited to… she had been in the successful Thin Man series and had appeared in a couple of Cary Grant movies. Other than those two things, I did not really think there was much to really know about Myrna Loy’s career…..boy was I wrong.
“Myrna Loy was one of cinema’s brightest stars. Beautiful, talented, warm, witty, wise and urbane, she swept all before her with a startling succession of box-office hits that lasted from 1932 until 1941, when wartime commitments overtook her career. Adored by moviegoers, Myrna was crowned “Queen of Hollywood” in 1938, with twenty million fans casting their votes in the largest poll of its kind ever conducted. Spencer Tracy was besotted with her, Valentino and Barrymore smitten and President Roosevelt obsessed, whilst Miss Loy had to push Gable off her front-step for “getting fresh”! Her extraordinary profile also supplied plastic surgeons with the most requested image of the 1930s, despite Myrna never having gone under the knife. Loy also managed to royally piss off Hitler by speaking out against his treatment of Jews and, with Chaplin, had the distinction of heading his blacklist”.
“Yet, somehow, Myrna Loy – at her peak more popular than Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn combined – seems almost forgotten. Whether this can be attributed to her gracious acting style (allowing her leading men to dominate), the lack of scandal in her private life, or the relative scarcity of her films in this country, I’m not sure, but it is a situation that deserves to be rectified”. The previous two paragraphs come from the Myrna Loy forum at Empire.com by Rick 7.
Her IMDb page shows 138 acting credits from 1925-1982. This page will rank Myrna Loy movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, shorts, cameos and movies and many of her early silent movies were not included in the rankings.
Myrna Loy Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.
Myrna Loy 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 Myrna Loy movies by co-stars of her movies
- Sort Myrna Loy movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Myrna Loy movies by domestic yearly box office rank
- Sort Myrna Loy 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 Myrna Loy movie received.
- Sort Myrna Loy movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
- Use the sort and search button to make this a very interactive page. For example type in William Powell to see 13 Powell/Loy movies….or type Clark Gable in the search box to bring up all of the Gable/Loy movies….or type in….I think you get the idea.
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Myrna LoyTable
- Twenty-nine Myrna Loy movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 41.42% of her movies listed. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was her biggest box office hit.
- An average Myrna Loy movie grosses $118.70 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 52 of Myrna Loy’s movies are rated as good movies…or 74.28% of her movies. After The Thin Man (1936) was her highest rated movie while Parnell (1937) was her lowest rated movie.
- Fifteen Myrna Loy movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 21.42% of her movies.
- Five Myrna Loy movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 7.14% of her movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score is 40.00. 49 Myrna Loy movies scored higher than that average….or 70.00% of her movies. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) got the the highest UMR Score while Just Tell Me What You Want (1980) got the lowest UMR Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Myrna Loy
1. Loy had 80 screen credits before finally becoming a star with the release of the low budget surprise hit….1934’s The Thin Man. This UMR page looks at her career from 1933-1980, with a few of her pre-1933 releases.
2. During her early years…..Loy appeared in the first ever European/American co-production…1925’s Ben-Hur…..she appeared in the first movie to use a movie score…..1926’s Don Juan…..she appeared in the first talkie….1927’s The Jazz Singer……and she appeared in the first ever filmed operetta….1929’s The Desert Song.
3. Myrna Loy appeared in over 120 movies, but never received an Oscar® nomination or a Golden Globe® nomination for any of her acting roles. She did receive an honorary Oscar® for career achievement in 1991.
4. In 1921, Loy posed for Harry Winebrenner’s statue titled “Spiritual,” which remained in front of Venice High School throughout the 20th century and can be seen in the opening scenes of the 1978 film Grease.
5. Gangster John Dillinger was shot to death after leaving a screening of the 1934 film Manhattan Melodrama which starred Loy, Clark Gable and William Powell.
6. Loy and William Powell appeared in 14 movies together. 6 times they appeared as Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man movie series (1934-1947). When looking at the table above….8 of their movies finished in Loy’s Top Ten according to critics and audiences.
7. Check out the list of co-stars for Loy…..Clark Gable (7 movies), Cary Grant (3 movies), Warner Baxter (3 movies), Spencer Tracy (2 films), and with one film….James Stewart, Jack Lemmon, Paul Newman, Frederich March, Will Rogers, Charlton Heston, Tyrone Power, and of course Burt Reynolds.
8. The first part of her career was in silent movies…she was typecast in exotic roles, often as a vamp or a woman of Asian descent…..her first film her character was called Vamp…..these roles kind of solidified her exotic non-America image…..which is strange as she was born and raised in Montana.
9. Loy’s big break? Loy attended a Hollywood party with director W.S. Dyke. At the party Dyke detected a wit and sense of humor that Loy’s films had not revealed. He then chose Loy for the Nora Charles role in The Thin Man. The success of The Thin Man changed how Hollywood viewed her, and her roles got bigger and better.
10. With the outbreak of World War II, she abandoned her acting career to focus on the war effort and worked closely with the Red Cross. She helped run a Naval Auxiliary Canteen and toured frequently to raise funds.
Check out Myrna Loy‘s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
Not enough stats for you?….Then check out 37 Myrna Loy worldwide adjusted grosses
- After the Thin Man (1936) $355.90 million in adjusted box office
- Animal Kingdom (1932) $58.10 million in adjusted box office
- Another Thin Man (1939) $267.40 million in adjusted box office
- The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947) $384.70 million in adjusted box office
- The Bad Man (1930) $84.00 million in adjusted box office
- The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) $859.60 million in adjusted box office
- Bride of the Regiment (1930) $69.70 million in adjusted box office
- The Desert Song (1929) $232.20 million in adjusted box office
- Double Wedding (1937) $264.40 million in adjusted box office
- Evelyn Prentice (1934) $122.30 million in adjusted box office
- The Great Ziegfeld (1936) $525.20 million in adjusted box office
- I Love You Again (1940) $185.30 million in adjusted box office
- Isle of Escape (1930) $37.10 million in adjusted box office
- Libeled Lady (1936) $306.00 million in adjusted box office
- Love Crazy (1941) $200.70 million in adjusted box office
- Lucky Night (1939) $130.20 million in adjusted box office
- Manhattan Melodrama (1934) $129.00 million in adjusted box office
- Man-Proof (1938) $136.90 million in adjusted box office
- The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932) $68.30 million in adjusted box office
- Men In White (1934) $152.20 million in adjusted box office
- Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) $197.50 million in adjusted box office
- New Morals For Old (1932) $36.60 Night Flight (1933) $112.30 million in adjusted box office
- Noah’s Ark (1928) $191.00 million in adjusted box office
- Parnell (1937) $204.70 million in adjusted box office
- Pay As You Enter (1928) $11.30 million in adjusted box office
- Petticoat Fever (1936) $121.90 million in adjusted box office
- The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933) $97.20 million in adjusted box office
- Shadow of the Thin Man (1941) $224.10 million in adjusted box office
- The Show of Shows (1929) $209.90 million in adjusted box office
- Song of the Thin Man (1947) $142.40 million in adjusted box office
- Test Pilot (1938) $487.60 million in adjusted box office
- The Thin Man Goes Home (1945) $193.90 million in adjusted box office
- The Thin Man, The (1934) $159.90 million in adjusted box office
- Too Hot To Handle (1938) $299.20 million in adjusted box office
- The Truth About Youth (1930) $37.00 million in adjusted box office
- Under a Texas Moon (1930) $107.50 million in adjusted box office
- Whipshaw (1935) $97.60 million in adjusted box office
- Wife vs Secretary (1936) $232.70 million in adjusted box office
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EXTRACT FROM LOY 1988 INTERVIEW CONTINUED
However this columnist for one had often wondered what she really thought of the tags ‘King and Queen.’ Reading between the lines, not much. When I asked her, she didn’t directly answer but with that Nora like twinkle still in her eye that had captivated Nick Charles all those years ago she simply smiled sweetly and said. ‘I worked with Clark on Test Pilot. Great fun and enormously popular but he was a terrible actor, who couldn’t have acted his way out of a paper bag.’
We turned to other topics and we spoke of Gary Cooper, a fellow Montanan of Myrna’s who had been a skillful practitioner of the screwball comedy in her best years. Again not one for over-statement, all she would say was that she didn’t find Cooper good at comedy.
Today, sadly Montanans have to live with the fact that for all their popularity during their careers, Loy and Cooper aren’t among the handful of classic film stars who are still household names — think John Wayne or Marilyn Monroe. Ed Noonan, who teaches film classes at Carroll College in Helena and is the former director of the Myrna Loy Center for the Performing Arts in Helena, and Andrew Patrick Nelson, a film professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, say they are typically greeted with blank stares from their students when they bring up the Cooper/Loy names.”
PERSONAL NOTE FROM BOB: We’ll have to get some of those students to attend Bruce Cogerson’s classes; they’ll soon change their tune!
“In the late 1930s MGM [having commissioned its OWN poll] announced that its stars Clark Gable and Myrna Loy were “King and Queen of Hollywood.” The studio was making money out of the two stars, especially Gable, and stars of all studios were encouraged by the big PR machines of the day to say sentimental things about what was after all a mercenary relationship between all parties.
Robert Taylor, at one stage MGM’s longest-serving contract actor, for example praised MGM for looking after both his professional and private lives so that “I never have to worry about things.” It was par for the course for performers to sentimentally enthuse about their studio with stuff like ‘The executives are like a father to me,’ whilst all the time performers and their bosses were fighting like rats over a brush about better films and contracts.
If the studios liked to be thought of ‘father figures’ for their stars, it could be argued that tagging two of MGM’s own as King and Queen on a back of a poll they paid for smacked of nepotism. Whilst no doubt there are always those movie fans who will believe all the Hollywood hype, I am sure that many others took the tag with a pinch of strong salt.
In articles that I had read Myrna herself apparently thought it judicious to tow the party line by cooing out statements like how flattering it was to be mentioned as Clark’s ‘queen’. There is do doubt it didn’t harm her as at the the end of the 1930s Gable was the whole rage with Gone with The Wind doing the rounds and for a time, he eclipsed other big male stars of the period like Cooper, Tracy, Crosby and Cary Grant.
HI BRUCE: Most people hand out presents when they COME BACK from holiday, but in Parts 2 and 3 I give you one before I go. I picked it up in an article I read recording a 1988 interview with Thins when she was 83 years of age.
It was too long an article to reproduce in full and it talks in detail about some of her films and also discusses her stances against the Nazis and The Senator from Wisconsin’s blacklisting addictions, her courage in publicly protesting about which I have long since praised her for on this site.
The article was also accompanied by a montage of around 20 stills of her in her heyday and there is no doubt when very young she was both sexy-looking and gorgeous, whilst many actresses are only one or the other.
I thought however that like Audrey Hepburn, she lost her gamine appearance rather prematurely and like Irene Dunne and Claudette Colbert all-too-soon Myrna had more the looks of an Archie Leach screen aunt or mother rather than his romantic leading lady, though you will recall that Archibald tended to have mothers in his movies who were more or less only his own age and lovers who looked like daughters! The chronology of Al’s relationships in his movies must have confused even Back to the Future fans!
Anyway I don’t have the skills of you and W o C for extracting in hard copy form photos and other graphics that appear on The Net so I’ll have to get my own expert [Daughter o Bob] to make for me a copy of one particular still: Thins cuddling Asta [some might say holding tightly onto her meal ticket!]. I want it for my memorabilia collection; but its yours for a fee of $100,000, which you could raise by raiding those bloated Unbreakable trilogy grosses on the Mr Gimme More page.
It is well known that you don’t like us to mix politics with movie matters on your site; but it would seem that your Leader is not reciprocating by keeping the movies out of politics, The Donald having just savaged [so fiercely that it makes Hirsch look like a wimp]the Best Picture award at this year’s Oscars, presumably because he didn’t like its political content. Horrified, I said to W o Bob “Donald Trump has just attacked Bruce’s Holy of Holies, The Academy. That’s one vote the President has lost in the forthcoming election!”
“Steve Lensman [TO BOB]
March 23, 2018 at 7:55 am
Well my Myrna post was written largely in jest, pushing your buttons so to speak. You take me and Bruce far too seriously regarding our lovely Myrna”
Dear Moses:
Regarding your 7.55 post and the extract above, when you look at my 9.29 am one and what I have said in the extract from IT immediately below can you really believe that I take it all over-seriously? What was the song that Burl Ives had a big hit with?
“It’s just my funny way of laughing,
Just my funny way of laughing
[Myrna] doesn’t bother me!”
“BOB to STEVE
March 23, 2018 at 9:29 am
I am becoming concerned that the Cogerson site instead of following the traditions of the Wall Street Journal and Variety in conveying financial accuracy is now joining the Fake News spreaders. Consequently I toss and turn in bed at night unable to sleep for fear that Bruce Willis Moore Cogerson and his cheerleader Steve “Mo” Lensman are in reality closet spammers”.
Sorry,Mo can’t keep my eyes open anymore!
“Steve Lensman [TO BOB]
March 23, 2018 at 7:55 am
Well my Myrna post was written largely in jest, pushing your buttons so to speak. You take me and Bruce far too seriously regarding our lovely Myrna”
Dear Moses:
Regarding your 7.55 post and the extract above, when you look at my 9.29 am one and what I have said in the extract from IT immediately below can you really believe that I take it all over-seriously? What was the song that Burl Ives had a big hit with?
“It’s just my funny way of laughing,
Just my funny way of laughing
[Myrna] doesn’t bother me!”
“BOB to STEVE
March 23, 2018 at 9:29 am
I am becoming concerned that the Cogerson site instead of following the traditions of the Wall Street Journal and Variety in conveying financial accuracy is now joining the Fake News spreaders. Consequently I toss and turn in bed at night unable to sleep for fear that Bruce Willis Moore Cogerson and his cheerleader Steve “Mo” Lensman are in reality closet spammers.”.
Sorry, Mo, can’t keep my eyes open anymore!