More Reasons To Love Miss Myrna Loy
Every time I watch “The Thin Man,” I think that Myrna Loy, from Radersburg, Montana, is my favorite all-time Hollywood actress. So I was interested to read in this posting what she, a lifelong liberal, thought of an actor’s need to underplay rather than overplay: ‘As a young girl, Loy had seen Eleonora Duse on the stage, and she had admired the restraint of that fabled actress. “Oh, I could have cried all over the place in many of my films, but it just didn’t feel right,†she said in her charming 1987 memoir, “Being and Becoming.” “The audience loses respect for the character. It seems that instinctively I’ve done this kind of underplaying a good deal in my work. That brand of acting had impressed me since first seeing Duse. She had an inner light, you see; you’ve got to have it…You can’t be thinking about how many people you’re having for dinner.â€
