Janet Gaynor was the first actress to win an Oscar®, for three films in 1927-28: Seventh Heaven, Sunrise and Street Angel. And she was, for a time in the late 1920s and early '30s, the biggest female star on the screen. A successor to "America's Sweetheart," Mary Pickford, she had the same waifish appeal and actually remade a couple of Pickford's silent films as talkies.

Born in Philadelphia in 1906, Gaynor lived with her family in Chicago, Florida and San Francisco before settling in Los Angeles. She began in films as an extra, eventually graduating to small parts, and then second leads. Fox offered a five-year contract and provided her first leading role in The Shamrock Handicap (1926).

Gaynor became an overnight star with Seventh Heaven (1927), playing a winsome streetwalker who finds love and redemption with another low-life character played by Charles Farrell. The pair shared potent chemistry and made a total of twelve films together including Street Angel (1928), Lucky Star (1929) and Delicious (1931).

After starring in other Fox vehicles including State Fair (1933), opposite Will Rogers as her father, and One More Spring (1935), Gaynor was loaned to MGM for the comedy Small Town Girl (1936), co-starring Robert Taylor as a city slicker who marries her. After leaving Fox, she starred in two excellent films for David O. Selznick, the original A Star Is Born (1937) and The Young in Heart (1938), a sprightly comedy about a family of con artists. She won an Oscar® nomination for the former film, in which she played the role later taken on by Judy Garland in the 1954 George Cukor remake. Gaynor returned to MGM for another romantic comedy, Three Loves Has Nancy (1938), in which she plays a housekeeper who falls for her boss (Robert Montgomery).

After these films Gaynor retired to marry top MGM dress designer Adrian. She had a one-shot comeback in films playing Pat Boone's mother in Bernardine (1957) and made a few forays into television and stage work before her death in 1984.

by Roger Fristoe