I have said for some time now that the wrong 1934 comedy swept the Big Five categories at the Academy Awards that year. It’s not that I dislike It Happened One Night particularly; it’s that The Thin Man is better. The frustrating thing, however, is that it was not possible for The Thin Man to sweep the categories as things stood, because Myrna Loy was not nominated for Best Actress. In fact, Myrna Loy never received a competitive Academy Award nomination, and the Academy apparently had to be lobbied to give her an honorary one when she was dying. I am astounded by this. Her work tends to make me want to use outdated nouns, a not uncommon feeling about the women I’ve profiled for this column thus far—vim and zing and zazz. She was full of all of them, perhaps especially as Nora Charles.

It seems so odd that she was originally from Montana and that she got her start as a model and dancer before settling into a series of Dragon Lady-type roles. Her mother does not seem to have liked Montana and continually pressured her father, an extremely successful businessman, to move the family. And when he died in the Spanish Flu epidemic, she was able to do so. In part, that was because she was working to further Myrna’s career. Myrna was in a total of 123 films over the course of her career, a vast number before 1934. And hard as it is to believe, Nora really was the role that made her a success.

It’s hard to imagine Nora played by anyone else to me. It isn’t just the charm of her relationship with William Powell, though goodness knows they played off one another well enough to be put into many other non-Thin Man movies together. It’s that she had the right sort of wry wit. Even as she became cast as “the Perfect Wife,” she was a perfect wife with a clear sense of humour. It would be easy to play Nora as a dumb socialite, a spoiled heiress who’s never had to think a day in her life, but I don’t think it would have been easy for Myrna Loy to have played her that way. I think the best she could have done was something who was perceived that way by others, knew it, and used it.

Apparently, the studio sent her to a plastic surgeon to get her ears done. The plastic surgeon took more pictures and from more angles than she was expecting—and then told her it was to help his work when women came in asking for “Myrna Loy’s nose.” He said she’d made him a fortune, and he’d do her ears for free. She didn’t take him up on it. But IMDb has some five hundred pictures of her, and in general, her hair is covering her ears.

She said that the irony of her perfect wife image was that she was herself four times divorced, childless, and unable to cook—apparently, that “childless” was as a result of being rendered infertile by a botched abortion, something much more common in those days. And I do find her complete dismissal of Christina Crawford’s allegations simply because she’d like Jane and didn’t like Christina a little worrying. But she went up against Ronald Reagan over equal housing opportunity. (She’d never been cast opposite him and didn’t like him anyway.) She was so vocal in her opposition to Hitler that she was on his personal blacklist. She had appeared in a blackface comedy in 1927, which she later denounced as “shameful.” She was in Don Juan, the first film with synchronized sound, and The Jazz Singer. She was a heck of a lady.