The paper deals with the stabilizability of linear plants whose parameters vary with time in a compact set. First, necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a linear gain-scheduled stabilizing compensator are given. Next, it is shown that, if these conditions are satisfied, any compensator transfer function depending on the plant parameters and internally stabilizing the closed-loop control system when the plant parameters are constant, can be realized in such a way that the closed-loop asymptotic stability is guaranteed under arbitrary parameter variations. To this purpose, it is preliminarily proved that any transfer function that is stable for all constant parameters values admits a realization that is stable under arbitrary parameter variations (linear parameter-varying (LPV) stability). Then, the Youla-Kucera parametrization of all stabilizing compensators is exploited; precisely, closed-loop LPV stability can be ensured by taking an LPV stable realization of the Youla-Kucera parameter. To find one such realization, a reasonably simple and general algorithm based on Lyapunov equations and Cholesky's factorization is provided. These results can be exploited to apply linear time-invarient design to LPV systems, thus achieving both pointwise optimality (or pole placement) and LPV stability. Some potential applications in adaptive control and online tuning are pointed out.