Claudette Colbert (September 13, 1903 ? July 30, 1996) was an Academy Award-winning French-American actress for It Happened One Night.

She was popular leading lady in Hollywood films, particularly during the 1930s and 1940s. Almost all her titles were American movies.

In 1999, she was ranked 12th by the American Film Institute in their list Greatest Female Stars of All Time.

Contents 1 Early life 1.1 Becoming an actress 2 Film career 3 Other works 4 Behind the scenes 5 Personal life 6 Opinion 7 Awards and nominations 8 See also 9 References 10 External links

Early life

She was born Lily Claudette Chauchoin in Paris, France to (1867-1925), a banker and diplomat, and his wife, the former Jeanne Loew (d. 1970). Her family emigrated to the United States when she was three years old and settled in New York City three years later, when her father encountered financial setbacks. Colbert was made a naturalized citizen of the United States.

She attended New York City public schools. Her very first acting part was in As You Like It. Colbert studied at Washington Irving High School to overcome a slight lisp. Her speech teacher Alice Rossetter encouraged her to audition for a play Rossetter had written, and she made stage debut at the Provincetown Playhouse in The Widow's Veil, at the age of fifteen.

She then attended the Art Students League of New York and worked as a stenographer, a salesclerk in womens' clothing, and a tutor in order to pay her expenses. She intended to become a fashion designer but after she attended a party with the playwright she was offered a three-line role in Morrison's new play. She appeared on the Broadway stage in a small role in The Wild Westcotts (1923). Colbert embarked on a stage career in 1925. She had used the name Claudette instead of Lily in high school, and for her stage name she added her paternal grandmother's maiden name, Colbert.

Becoming an actress

About the mid 1920s, she signed five-year contract with the producer Albert H. Woods. She played on Broadway from 1925 through 1929. During her early years on stage, she received critical acclaim on Broadway in the production of The Barker (1927).

In 1927, Colbert accepted an offer by First National to make her first film. She made her first motion picture appearance in For the Love of Mike (1927), her only silent film shot on location in New York City facilities, and now believed to be a lost film. It was unsuccessful. In 1928 she signed a film contract with Paramount Pictures, which enabled her to continue her stage career. Her screen career started in earnest early in 1929, after the arrival of sound. Her first talkie and first hit film was The Hole in the Wall (1929), co-starring Edward G. Robinson, and The Lady Lies (1929) was also successful.

Film career

She would make a total of four films with Fredric March, including Dorothy Arzner's Honor Among Lovers (1931), which fared well at the box-office. She sang in her role opposite Maurice Chevalier in the Ernst Lubitsch musical The Smiling Lieutenant (1931). By 1932 she had appeared in some 17 films, playing diverse roles in approximately four films per year.

Colbert's career prospects were enhanced when Cecil B. DeMille cast her as the Roman empress Poppaea in his historical epic, The Sign of the Cross (1932). In one of the scenes, she bathes in a marble pool filled with asses' milk. Later the same year she appeared in The Phantom President (1932). Other successes of this period included Tonight Is Ours (1933) and Torch Singer (1933). In 1933 she renegotiated her contract with Paramount and was allowed to appear in films at other studios. Four Frightened People (1934) was a social comedy that failed to find a substantial audience.

Perhaps her most famous role was as Ellie Andrews, in It Happened One Night (1934). This film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and she was selected for Best Actress.

Cleopatra (1934), with Colbert in the title role, was a box office success. She then starred in Imitation of Life (1934).

In 1935 and 1936, she was listed in the annual “Quigley Poll of the Top Ten Money Making Stars”, voted on by movie exhibitors throughout the U.S. for the stars who had generated the most revenue in their theaters.

Other films of rest of the 1930s include The Bride Comes Home (1935); Ernst Lubitsch's comedy Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), opposite Gary Cooper, her former co-star in His Woman (1931); Midnight (1939, one of her best), with Don Ameche; It's a Wonderful World (1939), with James Stewart. In 1938, she was reported to be the highest paid performer in Hollywood, with a salary of $426,924.

She also spent this period alternating between romantic comedies and dramas: Boom Town (1940), Preston Sturges' classicscrewball comedy The Palm Beach Story (1942, Some say the film is her comic best), Guest Wife (1945), Tomorrow Is Forever (1946), Without Reservations (1946), directed by Mervyn LeRoy and co-starring John Wayne, Three Came Home (1950), and her last screen romantic comedy Let's Make It Legal (1951). She seldom played strictly dramatic roles.

In 1945, she left Paramount Pictures after having spent most of her starring career there. Colbert and Fred MacMurray would make seven films together over 13 years, including The Egg and I (1947). The film was the twelfth most profitable American film of the 1940s, and one of the most significant commercial successes of her career. On the basis of this success, she made the “Quigley Poll of the Top Ten Money Making Stars”.

Several of her late 1940s films did well enough at the box office to sustain her career. After that, her doctor (who was also her husband) told her she could only film a short time each day, a request most directors were not willing to accommodate. By the 1950s, her career had begun to wind down.

Other works

From 1935 to 1954, she starred in numerous programs of CBS' Lux Radio Theater, one of the popular dramatic radio shows at the time.

From 1952 to 1954, she worked mostly in Europe. In 1954, Colbert made a deal with CBS to star in five teleplays after successful appearance in The Royal Family. From 1954 to 1960, she appeared in a number of programs in the infant medium of television, such as Blithe Spirit (1956). In 1959, she played her last major acting role on TV for 25 years, in The Bells of St. Mary's.

She stopped making motion pictures by the middle of that decade. Her last starring film was the western Texas Lady (1955). Her last major appearance was in 1961's soap opera, Parrish.

She returned to Broadway in 1956 in Janus. In 1958, she appeared with Charles Boyer, in the long-running The Marriage-Go-Round. Her other theatrical appearances included The Irregular Verb to Love (1963), The Kingfisher (1979) in which she co-starred with Rex Harrison, and Frederick Lonsdale's Aren't We All? (1985) in which she co-starred again with Harrison, first in London and then on Broadway.

Behind the scenes

Colbert was very particular regarding the way she appeared on screen. She believed that her face was difficult to light and photograph, and was obsessed with not showing her “bad” side, the right, to the camera, because of a small bump from a nose broken in childhood.

During the 1930s, she distrusted the new technicolor film process, and thought that she would not photograph well in color. Although she appeared in the early color film, Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), she preferred to be photographed in black-and-white.

In 1948, Colbert was replaced by Katharine Hepburn in the leading role in State of the Union after disagreements with Frank Capra.

Personal life

Colbert married twice. Her first husband was Norman Foster, an actor and later director, whom she married in 1928. She co-starred with him on the stage The Barker (1927), and in the film Young Man of Manhattan (1930). Colbert did not live with him and kept marriage a secret for many years. They divorced in 1935.

Four months after her divorce, on 24 December 1935, Colbert married Joel Jay Pressman (1901-1968), a Los Angeles surgeon. Colbert did not have any children.

She spent half of each year at her vacation home in Speightstown, Barbados, beginning in the early 1960s. However, her registered domicile remained the United States.

Colbert suffered a stroke in 1994 and never fully recovered; it curtailed her daily swims and speedboat rides. In 1996 she died at her oceanfront home in the former British colony, Barbados at the age of 92.

Most of Colbert's estate, estimated at $3.5 million and including her Manhattan apartment and villa in Barbados, was left to a friend, Helen O'Hagan (1931?), a retired director of corporate relations at Saks Fifth Avenue, whom Colbert had met in 1961 on the set of the actress's last film.

Opinion

• In 1930 she starred in Manslaughter. The New York Times wrote about it, “Claudette Colbert is capable of excellent acting. She shows some of it in her part of Lydia, although the film is so busy going on its way that there isn't much time.”

• Colbert was reluctant to appear in It Happened One Night (1934). Director Frank Capra recalled, “Colbert fretted, pouted and argued about her part… she was a tartar, but a cute one”

• Cecil B. DeMille perceived her as a femme fatale, and each of her three films with him included semi-nude, however she did not wish to be portrayed as a siren and thereafter refused such roles.

• During filming of So Proudly We Hail! (1943), a rift occurred between Colbert and Paulette Goddard when Colbert overheard a remark made by Goddard in an interview. Asked which of her costars she preferred, Goddard had replied, “Veronica, I think. After all, we are closer in age”. Veronica Lake commented that Colbert “flipped” and “was at Paulette's eyes at every moment” and said that they continued their feud throughout the duration of filming. Goddard (33 at the time) was actually closer to Colbert's age (40) than Veronica Lake's (24).

• In Since You Went Away (1944); producer David O. Selznick predicted that she would feel threatened by the idea of playing a more mature character. He had been impressed by her performance in So Proudly We Hail! (1943) as well as her box-office clout, commenting that “even light little comedies with her have never done under a million and a half.” Director John Cromwell later noted that Colbert was “level headed, very professional and with no temperament.” The film grossed almost five million dollars in the United States. The critic, James Agee, commented that it was the “richest, biggest role of her career”. He also wrote that she demonstrated “smooth Hollywood formula acting, and sometimes ? in collaboration with Mr. (Joseph) Cotten ? flashes of acting that are warmer and more mature.”

• David O. Selznick wrote in a memo that they had rebuilt several sets of Since You Went Away (1944) “because of her refusal to have the right side of her face photographed, on top of which we have to pay her not only a fabulous salary, but also give her two days off a month, which works out to $5000 every four weeks for doing absolutely nothing, and now she's demanding three…. Tell her there's a war on and we all have to make some sacrifices.”

• Irene Dunne commented that she lacked Colbert's “terrifying ambition” and noted that if Colbert finished work on a film on a Saturday, she would be looking for a new project by Monday. Hedda Hopper once wrote that Colbert placed her career ahead of everything “save possibly her marriage”, and described her as the “smartest and canniest” of Hollywood actresses, with a strong sense of what was best for her, and a “deep rooted desire to be in shape, efficient and under control”.

• By the time Joseph L. Mankiewicz began working on a screenplay of All About Eve (1950), he had decided on Claudette Colbert for the lead female role, as she represented the style of actress that he envisioned for the part. He admired her “sly wit and sense of class” and felt that she would play the role as an “elegant drunk” who would easily win the sympathy of the audience. But Colbert withdrew after severely injuring her back.

• Colbert is cited by modern film historians as a leading female exponent of screwball comedy, along with such actresses as Jean Arthur, Irene Dunne, Rosalind Russell, Carole Lombard and Myrna Loy. In her comedy films, she invariably played shrewd and self reliant women, but unlike many of her contemporaries, Colbert rarely engaged in physical comedy, with her characters more likely to be observers and commentators.

Awards and nominations

Colbert was also nominated the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1936 for Private Worlds, and in 1945 for Since You Went Away.

She was nominated for Broadway's 1959 Tony Award as Best Actress (Dramatic) for The Marriage-Go-Round, and she won the 1980 Sarah Siddons Award for Best Actress to play in Chicago for the season 1979-80 for her performance in the play, The Kingfisher.

During her career, Claudette Colbert appeared in more than sixty films. For her contribution to the motion picture industry, she was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6812 Hollywood Blvd.

In 1987, she returned to TV in two-part film, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Mini-series or a Special. In 1988, she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture made for TV.

In 1989, she was awarded the Kennedy Center Honors.

Awards
Preceded by Katharine Hepburn for Morning Glory	Academy Award for Best Actress 1934 for It Happened One Night	Succeeded by Bette Davis for Dangerous
Preceded by Olivia de Havilland for	Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Series, Mini-series, or Motion Picture Made for Television 1988 for The Two Mrs. Grenvilles	Succeeded by Katherine Helmond for Who's the Boss

Preceded by Bob Hope and Thelma Ritter 27th Academy Awards

“Oscars” host 28th Academy Awards (with Jerry Lewis and Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

Succeeded by Jerry Lewis and Celeste Holm 29th Academy Awards

See also

For a full chronology of Claudette Colbert's work, see: Works of Claudette Colbert

References

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