​Loretta Young (born Gretchen Young; 6 January 1913 – 12 August, 2000) was an American actress. Starting as a child actress, she had a long and varied career in film from 1917 to 1953. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the film The Farmer's Daughter (1947), and received her second Academy Award nomination for her role in Come to the Stable (1949). Young moved to the relatively new medium of television, where she had a dramatic anthology series, The Loretta Young Show, from 1953 to 1961. The series earned three Emmy Awards, and was re-run successfully on daytime TV and later in syndication. In the 1980s, Young returned to the small screen and won a Golden Globe for her role in Christmas Eve in 1986.

Loretta Young was born Gretchen Young in Salt Lake City, Utah, the daughter of Gladys and John Earle Young. When she was two years old, her parents separated, and when she was three, her mother moved the family to Hollywood. She and her sisters Polly Ann and Elizabeth Jane (better known as Sally Blane) all worked as child actresses, but of the three, Gretchen was the most successful.

Young's first role was at the age of two or three in the silent film Sweet Kitty Bellairs. During her high-school years she was educated at Ramona Convent Secondary School. She was signed to a contract by John McCormick, husband and manager of actress Colleen Moore, who saw the young girl's potential. Moore gave her the name Loretta, explaining that it was the name of her favorite doll.

Young was billed as Gretchen Young in the silent film Sirens of the Sea (1917). She was first billed as Loretta Young in 1928, in The Whip Woman. In 1929, she was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars.

In 1930, when she was 17, she eloped with 26-year-old actor Grant Withers with whom she was married in Yuma, Arizona. The marriage was annulled the next year, just as their second movie together (ironically entitled Too Young to Marry) was released.

Young, a devout Catholic, considered abortion a mortal sin, so when her pregnancy began to advance, she went on a "vacation" to England. Young gave birth to a daughter, Judith, on November 6, 1935, in Venice, California. Young named Judith after St. Jude because he was the patron saint of (among other things) difficult situations. Weeks after her birth, Judith was placed in an orphanage where she spent the next 19 months in various "hideaways and orphanages" before being re-united with her mother;  Young then claimed that she had adopted Judith. 

In 1947, Young won an Oscar for her performance in The Farmer's Daughter. ​

From the time of Young's retirement in the 1960s until not long before her death, she devoted herself to volunteer work for charities and churches with her friends of many years: Jane Wyman, Irene Dunne, and Rosalind Russell. Young briefly came out of retirement to star in two television films: Christmas Eve (1986) and Lady in a Corner (1989). She won a Golden Globe Award for the former and was nominated for the latter.

In 1988, Young received the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who through their endurance and the excellence of their work helped expand the role of women in the entertainment industry.

In 1993, Young married for the third and final time, to the fashion designer Jean Louis, who has designed the Marilyn Monore dress which she worn for Jack Kennedy's birthday in 1962.

Their marriage lasted until his death in April 1997. 

Loretta Young died of ovarian cancer on 12 August 2000, at the home of her maternal half-sister, Georgiana Montalbán (the wife of actor Ricardo Montalban) in Santa Monica, California. She was interred in the family plot in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Her ashes were buried in the grave of her mother, Gladys Belzer.

​Linda Christian (born Blanca Rosa Welter; November 13, 1923 – July 22, 2011) was a Mexican film actress, who appeared in Mexican and Hollywood films. Her career reached its peak in the 1940s and 1950s. She played Mara in the last Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan film Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948). She is also noted for being the first Bond girl, appearing in a 1954 television adaptation of the James Bond novel Casino Royale. In 1963 she starred as Eva Ashley in an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour titled "An Out for Oscar".

Linda Christian was born in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico, a daughter of Royal Dutch Shell executive Gerardus Jacob Welter (1904–1981), and his Mexican-born wife, the former Blanca Rosa Vorhauer (1901-1992), who was of Spanish, German and French descent. The Welter family moved a great deal during Christian's youth, living everywhere from South America and Europe to the Middle East and Africa. As a result of this nomadic lifestyle, Christian became an accomplished polyglot with the ability to speak fluent French, German, Dutch, Spanish, English, Italian and even a bit of haphazard Arabic and Russian.

Christian had three younger siblings, a sister and two brothers.

Her stage name was invented by Flynn, who gave her the surname of Fletcher Christian of Mutiny on the Bounty. Flynn had played Fletcher Christian in a 1933 Australian film.

In his autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Flynn states that immediately after Linda Christian's screen test, he offered to pay for her to have a couple of crooked teeth fixed. When he got a whopping bill, he discovered that she had taken the opportunity to undergo major cosmetic dentistry. Years later, when he met her again, he said, "Smile, baby – I want to see those choppers: they took their first bite out of me."

She made her film debut in the 1944 musical comedy Up in Arms, followed by Holiday in Mexico (1946), Green Dolphin Street (1947), and what was perhaps her best-known film, Tarzan and the Mermaids (1948). She was the subject of a well-known photograph published in the January 1, 1949 issue of Vogue.

Christian was the first Bond girl to appear on screen, playing Valerie Mathis (opposite Barry Nelson as James Bond) in the 1954 TV adaptation of Casino Royale, beating Ursula Andress to the screen by eight years.

On several occasions, Christian and Power were offered the opportunity to work together, but for various reasons each offer was refused or rescinded. The most notable opportunity to co-star together came in 1953, when they were offered leading roles in From Here to Eternity. Power did not want to do the film and rejected the offer. The roles went to Donna Reed and Montgomery Clift. Another film they were offered together was Solomon and Sheba, but again Tyrone Power did not want to do it.

In September 1958, Christian's ex-husband Tyrone Power and his third wife Debbie Minardos (Deborah Jean Smith) went to Madrid and Valdespartera, Spain, to film the Solomon and Sheba. Power had filmed about 75 percent of his scenes when he was stricken by a massive heart attack while filming a dueling scene with his frequent co-star and friend, George Sanders. A doctor, Juan Olaguíbel, diagnosed Power's death as "fulminant angina pectoris." He died while being transported to the hospital in Madrid on November 15, aged 44.

Christian later would live in Spain for a few years.

Lauren Bacall (born Betty Joan Perske; September 16, 1924 – August 12, 2014) was an American actress. She was named the 20th-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema by the American Film Institute and received an Academy Honorary Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2009 in recognition of her contribution to the Golden Age of motion pictures. She was known for her distinctive voice and sultry looks.

Bacall began a career as a model before making her film debut as the leading lady in To Have and Have Not (1944) at the age of 19. She continued in the film noir genre with appearances alongside husband Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948), and she starred in the romantic comedies How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) with Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, and Designing Woman (1957) with Gregory Peck. She co-starred with John Wayne in his final film The Shootist (1976) by Wayne's personal request. She also worked on Broadway in musicals, earning Tony Awards for Applause (1970) and Woman of the Year (1981). She won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996).

Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske on September 16, 1924, in The Bronx, New York City, the only child of her parents, both of whom were Jewish. They were divorced when Bacall was five, after which she no longer saw her father. 

Bacall was close to her mother, who remarried to Lee Goldberg and went to live in California after Bacall became a movie star. ​

​In 1941, Bacall took lessons at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she was a classmate of Kirk Douglas, while working as a theatre usher at the St. James Theatre and as a fashion model.

She made her acting debut on Broadway in 1942, at age 17, as a walk-on in Johnny 2 X 4, and in 1942, she was crowned Miss Greenwich Village.

As a teenage fashion model, she appeared on the cover of Harper's Bazaar, and in magazines such as Vogue. An article in Life magazine in 1948 referred to her "cat-like grace, tawny blonde hair, and blue-green eyes".

Though Diana Vreeland is often credited with discovering Bacall for Harper's Bazaar, it was in fact Nicolas de Gunzburg who introduced the 18-year-old to Vreeland. He had first met Bacall at Tony's, a club in the East 50s. De Gunzburg suggested that Bacall stop by his Bazaar office the next day. He then turned over his find to Vreeland, who arranged for Louise Dahl-Wolfe to shoot Bacall in Kodachrome for the March 1943 cover.

The Harper's Bazaar cover caught the attention of "Slim" Keith, the wife of Hollywood producer and director Howard Hawks. She urged her husband to have Bacall take a screen test for his forthcoming film, To Have and Have Not. Hawks asked his secretary to find out more about her, but the secretary misunderstood and sent Bacall a ticket to come to Hollywood for the audition.

​After meeting Bacall in Hollywood, Hawks immediately signed her to a seven-year contract, with a weekly salary of $100, and personally began to manage her career. He changed her first name to Lauren, and she chose "Bacall", a variant of her mother's maiden name, as her screen surname. Slim Hawks also took Bacall under her wing, dressing Bacall stylishly and guiding her in matters of elegance, manners, and taste. At Hawks' suggestion, Bacall was also trained by a voice coach to make her voice lower and deeper, instead of her normal high-pitched, nasal voice. As part of her training, she was required to shout verses of Shakespeare for hours every day. Her height, at 5 feet 8½ inches (1.74 m), unusual among young actresses in the 1940s and 1950s, also helped her stand out. 

After To Have and Have Not, Bacall was seen opposite Charles Boyer in Confidential Agent (1945), which was poorly received by critics. By her own estimation, it could have caused considerable damage to her career, but her next performance as the mysterious, acid-tongued Vivian Rutledge in Hawks's film noir The Big Sleep (1946), co-starring Bogart, provided a quick career resurgence.

The Big Sleep laid the foundation for her status as an icon of film noir. She would be strongly associated with the genre for the rest of her career, and would often be cast as variations of the independent and sultry femme fatale character of Vivian she played in the movie. 

Bacall was cast with Bogart in two more films: Dark Passage (1947), another film noir in which she played an enigmatic San Francisco artist; and John Huston's melodramatic suspense film Key Largo (1948).

Bacall turned down scripts she did not find interesting, and thereby earned a reputation for being difficult. Despite this, she further solidified her star status in the 1950s by appearing as the leading lady in a string of films that won favorable reviews.

Bacall was cast opposite Gary Cooper in Bright Leaf (1950). In the same year, she played a two-faced femme fatale in Young Man with a Horn (1950), a jazz musical co-starring Kirk Douglas and Doris Day.

From 1951 to 1952, Bacall co-starred with Bogart in the syndicated action-adventure radio series Bold Venture.

She starred in the first CinemaScope comedy How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), a runaway hit among critics and at the box office. Directed by Jean Negulesco and co-starring Marilyn Monroe and Betty Grable, Bacall got positive notices for her turn as the witty gold-digger, Schatze Page. 

After the success of How to Marry a Millionaire, she was offered, but declined, with Bogart's support, the coveted invitation from Grauman's Chinese Theatre to press her hand- and footprints in the theatre's cemented forecourt. "I want to feel I've earned my place with the best my business has produced."

While struggling at home with Bogart suffering from terminal esophageal cancer, Bacall starred with Gregory Peck in Designing Woman (1957) to solid reviews. The musical comedy was her second feature with director Vincente Minnelli and was released in New York on May 16, 1957, four months after Bogart's death on January 14.

Bacall was seen in only a handful of films in the 1960s. The few films Bacall made during this period were all-star vehicles such as Sex and the Single Girl (1964) with Henry Fonda, Tony Curtis, and Natalie Wood; Harper (1966) with Paul Newman, Shelley Winters, Julie Harris, Robert Wagner, and Janet Leigh; and Murder on the Orient Express (1974), with Ingrid Bergman, Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave, Martin Balsam, and Sean Connery.

She starred on Broadway in Goodbye, Charlie in 1959, and went on to have a successful on-stage career in Cactus Flower (1965), Applause (1970), and Woman of the Year (1981). She won Tony Awards for her performances in the latter two.

​She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her role in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), her first nomination after a career span of more than 50 years. She had already won a Golden Globe and was widely expected to win the Oscar, but she lost to Juliette Binoche for The English Patient.

Bacall received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1997, and she was voted one of the 25 most significant female movie stars in history in 1999 by the American Film Institute.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her an Honorary Academy Award at the inaugural Governors Awards on November 14, 2009.

Lauren Bacall died on August 12, 2014, one month before her 90th birthday, at her longtime apartment in The Dakota, the Upper West Side building near Central Park in Manhattan. According to her grandson Jamie Bogart, Bacall died after suffering a massive stroke. She was confirmed dead at New York–Presbyterian Hospital.

Bacall had an estimated $26.6 million estate. The bulk of her estate was divided among her three children: Leslie Bogart, Stephen Humphrey Bogart, and Sam Robards. Additionally, Bacall left $250,000 each to her youngest grandsons, the sons of Sam Robards, for college.