The 1962 Movie "The L-Shaped Room"

In November 1982 -- nine months before the Dirty Dancing story -- American movie theaters showed a movie titled The L-Shaped Room. The movie portrays a French young woman named Jane who is living in London. Jane is pregnant but unmarried and living alone. The woman declines an offer of marriage from another man. She gives birth to her baby and will raise it as a single mother.

Penny Johnson surely would have gone to watch the movie, because the heroine Jane was played by Leslie Caron who had starred in dancing roles in previous hit movies. The following two videos show Caron dancing with Gene Kelly in the 1951 movie An American in Paris, with Fred Astaire in the 1955 movie Daddy Long Legs. and with Louis Jourdan in the 1958 movie Gigi.

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Caron did not dance in The L-Shaped Room, but she received an Academy Awards nomination for the year's Best Actress, and she won the Boston Globes award for Best Actress. The Wikipedia article about The L-Shaped Room summarizes the plot as follows:

A 27-year-old French woman, Jane Fosset (Caron), arrives alone at a rundown boarding house in Notting Hill, London, moving into an L-shaped room. Beautiful but withdrawn, she encounters the residents of her house, each a social outsider in his or her own way.

Jane is pregnant and has no desire to marry the father. On her first visit to a doctor, she wants to find out if she really is pregnant and consider her options. The doctor's facile assumption that she must want either marriage or an abortion insults her to the extent that Jane determines to have the child. She and Toby (Bell) start a romance, which is disrupted when he learns that she is pregnant by a previous suitor. They try to work things out, but he is also unhappy with his lack of income and success as a writer.

Jane befriends the other residents and they help her when she goes into labour. Toby visits her in the hospital and gives her a copy of his new book, called The L-Shaped Room. After leaving the hospital, Jane journeys home to her parents in France, saying goodbye to the room where she had lived for seven months.

The following video clips show Caron acting in the movie.

The following video clip shows Jane in a hospital maternity ward, but the clip is accompanied by music that is not in the movie.

If Penny Johnson did the watch the movie, then it surely gave her much food for thought about what she might do if she ever got into a situation of being pregnant and alone.