Janet Gaynor

At the time, the award was awarded for multiple roles: it was given on the basis of the actor's total work over the year, and not just for one particular performance. Gaynor was not only the first but also, at 22 years old, the youngest actress to win an Academy Award for Best Actress up until 1986. Gaynor was one of only a handful of leading ladies who made a successful transition to sound films. For a number of years, Gaynor was the Fox studios foremost actress and was given the choice of prime roles, starring in such films as Sunny Side Up (1929), Delicious (1931), Merely Mary Ann (also 1931), and Adorable (1933), as well as State Fair (1933) with Will Rogers and The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935), which introduced Henry Fonda to the screen as Gaynor's leading man. However, when Darryl F. Zanuck merged his fledgling studio, 20th Century Pictures, with Fox Film Corporation to form Twentieth Century Fox, her status became precarious and even tertiary to that of actresses Loretta Young and Shirley Temple, although she always received top billing in every movie that she made during the 1930s, including Ladies in Love (1937) with Constance Bennett, Young, and Tyrone Power. She managed to terminate her contract with the studio and achieved acclaim in films produced by David O. Selznick in the mid-1930s. Read Less