"People I employ have the impertinence to call me Myrna Loy"

Always one of my favourite actresses, today would have been the 105th birthday of the marvellous and beautiful Myrna Loy...

Supremely versatile, in her long career from the 20s to the 80s Miss Loy put her considerable talents to a variety of cameo and starring roles on the silver screen, including vamp, villainess, gypsy, moll and chorus girl - playing alongside such huge stars as Rudolph Valentino, Boris Karloff, Ramon Navarro and Clark Gable - before becoming best known as "Hollywood's Perfect Wife" [sic] for her role as Nora in the long running Thin Man movies alongside William Powell.

These were wildly popular throughout the 1940s, and Miss Loy built upon their success with a string of movie and TV appearances with the likes of Cary Grant, Olivia De Havilland, Robert Mitchum and even in all-star vehicles such as Airport 1975. I love her!

Here, she camps it up for one of the Fu Manchu movies:

Myrna Loy & Boris Karloff in The Mask Of Fu Manchu

Here's the trailer for her screen-stealing role in The Best Years Of Our Lives - for which many people thought she should have at least been nominated for an Oscar:

The Best Years of Our Lives trailer

And here's a short selection of witty scenes from The Thin Man films:

Nick and Norah moments

In the end she never received an Oscar nomination for any of her movies, but two years before she died, Miss Loy was awarded the 1991 Academy Honorary Award "for her career achievement". A great lady.

Myrna Loy on IMDB