Loretta Young was one of the first Hollywood actors to move successfully from movies to a television series. She made that transition in 1953 with Letter to Loretta (soon retitled The Loretta Young Show), an anthology drama series. Anthology dramas were a staple of 1950s programming, presenting different stories with differ­ ent characters and casts each week. Young hosted and produced the series and acted in more than half the episodes as well. Capitalizing on her glamorous movie star image, her designer fashions became her television trademark. The show's success spurred other similar series, but Young's was the most successful. She was one of the few women who had control of her own successful series, the first woman to have her own dramatic anthology series on network television, and the first person to win both an Academy Award and an Emmy Award.

     Loretta Young began her acting career with bit parts as a child extra in silent films. By the mid- l930s, fashion and glamour were important components of her star image. By 1948, after more than 20 years in films, she was recognized for her acting when she won the Best Actress Academy Award for her performance in The Farmer's Daughter; a romantic comedy. In 1952 she made her last feature film (released in 1953) and jumped eagerly into television. For older movie actors, television offered new opportunities, and at 40 Young was considered "older" when she began her series. Following her lead with prime-time anthology dramas were actors Jane Wyman, June Allyson, and Barbara Stanwyck.

As a movie star and as a woman, Young realistically had two options for a television series in 1953. CBS, the situation comedy network, home of Lucille Ball and I Love Lucy, suggested a sitcom. NBC offered an anthology drama. Not a zany comedian like Ball or Martha Raye (who appeared in comedy-variety shows). Young went for the anthology drama. In doing so, she would follow film actor Robert Montgomery (Robert Montgomery Presents) to prime-time success as host and actor in her own dramatic anthology series. She wanted the anthology format  afforded-act­ ing variety, a format for conveying moral messages, and a showcase for her glamorous, fashionable movie star image. Though many anthology dramas were broadcast live, Young. like most movie stars trying series TV, chose telefilm production, a mode that was not only more familiar but also able to bring future profit through syndication.

     Young and husband Thomas Lewis (who was instrumental in setting up Armed Forces Radio during World War II and developed numerous radio programs) cre­ated Lewislor Enterprises to produce the series. Al­ though Young and Lewis both functioned as executive producers, it was Lewis who was initially credited as the official executive producer. When he left the series by the end of the third season, Young became the sole executive producer. However, her name never appeared in the credits as a producer of the show. When her five-year contract with NBC was up. Young formed a new company. Toreto Enterprises, which produced the series’ last three seasons.

     Religious and moral questions had long concerned Young. Known for her religious faith and work on behalf of Catholic charities, the stories she selected for production in her series carried upbeat messages about family, community, and personal conviction, and every story was summed up with a quotation from the Bible or some other recognized source. Concerned about postwar changes in American society, Young advocated TV entertainment with a message. Scripts hinged on the resolution of moral dilemmas. Numerous civic and religious groups honored her for this. She also won three Emmys. the first in 1955 as Best Dramatic Actress in a Continuing Series.

     Fashion had also been an important component of Young's star image and was central to her television program. Indeed, fashion may be the most memorable feature of The Loretta Young Show. Every episode opened with Young making a swirling entrance showcasing her designer dresses, a move that became her television trademark. Many of the dresses she wore on the show were designed by Dan Werle, and some were marketed under the label Werle Originals. Young's strong feelings about fashion were publicized again in the early 1970s, when she won a suit against NBC for allowing her then-dated fashion introductions to be shown in syndication. While this emphasis on fashion actually served Young's conviction that women had to maintain their femininity, as a star she epitomized a supposed paradox: she was beautiful and feminine, but she was also a strong­ willed woman with a career.

     While the star and her fashions often attracted viewers, some complained that Young and her show were sentimental, lowbrow women's entertainment, a typical criticism of women's fiction, where stories focus on the relationships and emotions constituting women's traditional sphere of home and family. The criticism was also typical of a 1950s conceit that filmed television series were inferior to prestigious live anthology dramas such as Studio One and Philco Television Playhouse.

     Young's anecdotal and philosophical book, The Things I Had to Learn, was published in 1961, the same year her prime-time series went off the air. Her philosophies about life, success, and faith were the basis of the book, just as they had been for The Loretta Young Show. However, it should be noted that Helen Ferguson, Young's publicist, really wrote most, if not all, of the book.

     She returned to series television in the 1962-63 season with The New Loretta Young Show, a situation comedy, and formed LYL Productions to produce the series. The story originally centered on her as a widowed writer-mother, but her character was married by the end of the season. This new series lasted only one season, and Young did not return to television again until 1986, when she appeared in a made-for-TV movie, Christmas Eve. She won a Golden Globe Award for that performance. Her last television performance and dramatic role was in another made-for-TV movie, Lady in the Corner (1989), in which she played the publisher of a fashion magazine. In August 2000, Loretta Young's long career finally came to an end when she succumbed to ovarian cancer.

     Loretta Young is probably most important to televi­ sion's history as a woman who blazed a path for other women as both an actor and a producer, who succeeded with her own prime-time show in a format that was not a situation comedy, and who was able to trans­fer success in film to success in television. Few film stars have made this transition, and certainly none have done so with more glamour or grace than the inimitable Loretta Young.