Myrna Loy, who as the charming sophisticate Nora Charles made marriage look like a lark in the "Thin Man" movies, is dead at 88.
Loy, who died Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital, where she had been hospitalized for about a month with an undisclosed illness, had a career that stretched from silent films to TV sitcoms and included more than 100 movies.For a generation in the 1930s and '40s, she was known as "the woman every man wanted to marry."
On screen, she came across as smart, charming, affectionate, witty and unflappable.
"To meet whom did Franklin D. Roosevelt find himself tempted to call off the Yalta Conference? Myrna Loy," Lauren Bacall said at a 1985 Motion Picture Academy tribute. "And to see what lady in what picture did John Dillinger risk coming out of hiding to meet his bullet-ridden death in an alley in Chicago? Myrna Loy, in `Manhattan Melodrama.' "
Off screen, Loy supported a variety of liberal causes. She was one of the first stars to challenge Hollywood discrimination against blacks and spoke out against McCarthy-era efforts to blacklist actors suspected of communist sympathies.
"She had an intellect," said Tony Randall, who appeared with her in the TV series "Love, Sidney." "She never cared very much about clothes or anything like that. She cared about causes."
Loy's most famous role was opposite William Powell's sleuth Nick Charles in the six "Thin Man" movies of the 1930s and '40s. As Nora, Loy was undaunted by bullets and matched her irreverent husband martini for martini, joking him out of hangovers and presiding with grace at a party full of hoodlums.
In her own life, Loy was married and divorced four times.
"In those days we still had this thing that we had to get married," she said in 1980. She had no children.