Claudette Colbert

Colbert, Claudette (13 Sept. 1905?-30 July 1996), actress, was born Lily Claudette Chauchoin in Paris, France, the daughter of Georges Chauchoin, a banker, and Jeanne Loew Chauchoin. Some sources indicate that she was born in 1903. When her father's business failed around 1910, her family immigrated to the United States, settling in New York City. Her father died soon afterward, and her strong-willed grandmother became the head of the family. Colbert later recalled that her grandmother greatly influenced her own worldview: "My grandmother had taught me to avoid inferiority complexes, to go out and get what I wanted, to believe I could be and do anything I wanted. I think I was a very healthy-minded, positivist [young woman], and I can thank her for that" (quoted in Quirk, p. 7). She attended Washington Irving High School, studying design in preparation for a career in the fashion industry. She also dabbled in acting, and in 1918 she appeared in a Greenwich Village theater in The Widow's Veil, a play written by one of her teachers. Following her graduation, she attended the Art Students League and worked in several dress shops, supplementing her income by giving French lessons. In 1923 she met the playwright Anne Morrison at a party; Morrison, taken with her poise and good looks, cast her in a three-line role in her play The Wild Westcotts. Colbert (who adopted her stage name for her Broadway debut) found herself acting with established stars Cornelia Otis Skinner and Elliott Nugent; although the play flopped, she was exhilarated by the experience and decided that she wanted to make her career in the theater.

For the next few years she appeared in small roles in several forgettable plays, such as We've Got to Have Money (1923) andThe Cat Came Back (1924). "In the very beginning, they wanted to give me French roles," she told an interviewer. "You know, cute little maids with dark bangs and an accent. That's why I used to say my name Col-bert just as it is spelled instead of Col-baire. I did not want to be typed as 'that French girl'" (quoted in Quirk, p. 7). In 1925 she won good reviews in the farce A Kiss in a Taxi, which ran for over 100 performances. Her breakthrough role came in 1927 in The Barker, costarring with Walter Huston and Norman Foster as a carnival snake charmer.New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson suggested that her "superior" performance effectively conveyed "the earnestness under the tawdry exterior of a midway slut."

Colbert's success in The Barker drew the interest of First National Studios, which cast her in the silent film For the Love of Mike (1927), directed by Frank Capra. The director later called the cheaply made picture the worst of his career; Colbert, who hated the broad pantomiming required by the silents, which deprived her of the use of her throaty, charming voice, determined never to make another film. The Barker ran on Broadway for 172 performances through 1927 and was taken to London in 1928. That year she married her costar Norman Foster; they had no children and would divorce in 1934. In 1929 she returned to Broadway in a dramatic role in Dynamo, a lesser play by Eugene O'Neill, and in See Naples and Die, a failed romantic comedy by Elmer Rice.

Colbert was lured back to films by the advent of sound and a generous contract offer from Paramount's New York City-based Astoria Studios, which promoted her as one of the main stars on their lot. She starred in six pictures for Astoria between 1929 and 1931, often playing blandly virtuous heroines. Because the studio used inferior sound equipment, her pictures were poorly received by critics and the public and did little to build her screen career. In 1932 Paramount shut down its East Coast facilities and moved her to Hollywood, where she was reduced to playing supporting roles. In 1933 she was "discovered" by Cecil B. De Mille and cast as "the wickedest woman in the world," Nero's wife, Poppaea, in the epic The Sign of the Cross. One notorious scene featured her taking a bath in asses' milk while her cats lapped and mewed by the side of the pool; the hit film's publicity proclaimed her as Hollywood's newest sex goddess. But her stock at the studio dropped when she starred over the next two years in several box-office disappointments, including De Mille's disastrously bad deserted-island adventure Four Frightened People (1934).

In 1934 Colbert was lent to the poverty-row studio Columbia Pictures to star in It Happened One Night. The film's genesis was unpromising: Colbert and director Frank Capra had "ended up hating each other" while making the failed For the Love of Mike (McBride, p. 304); six other actresses, including Myrna Loy and Carole Lombard, had turned down her part; and costar Clark Gable was forced to do the project by MGM, which had loaned him to Columbia as punishment for demanding a salary increase. The film's simple story concerns a spoiled heiress (played by Colbert) who runs away from her millionaire father; while on a bus, she meets an unemployed reporter (played by Gable) with whom, after many traveling mishaps, she falls in love. Although the picture received tepid reviews and closed quickly in major cities, it was embraced in small towns and rural areas and through word of mouth became a national phenomenon. Audiences delighted at the costars' playful sexiness: in one famous scene, Gable unsuccessfully tries to hitch a ride with his thumb before grudgingly giving way to Colbert, who shows a bit of her leg and brings a passing automobile screeching to a halt. Critics today applaud the film's deft mixture of comedy and social commentary, with its charming hero and heroine on the road in a nation suffering through the calamity of dislocation and uprootedness brought on by the Depression. Grossing over $6 million, It Happened One Night swept the major Academy Awards--an unprecedented feat--including a best actress award for Colbert. A landmark picture, it cemented her stardom and established her gifts as a comic actress.

Over the next several years Colbert demonstrated her considerable versatility. She played a working mother in the melodrama Imitation of Life (1934), gave a campy performance as the title character in De Mille's Cleopatra (1934), and portrayed a dedicated psychiatrist in Private Worlds (1935), for which she received an Academy Award nomination as best actress. She also gave effective performances in historical dramas such as Maid of Salem (1937) and Drums along the Mohawk (1939). But her best work came in romantic comedies: Ernst Lubitsch's Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), Mitchell Leisen's hilariousMidnight (1939), Woody Van Dyke's It's a Wonderful World (1939), and Preston Sturges's anarchic The Palm Beach Story (1942). In a genre dominated by zany screwball heroines, Colbert was unique: she played chic modern women who were keenly intelligent and self-assured. As the film critic Jeanine Basinger has pointed out, the opening scene from Midnight exemplifies the typical Colbert character: she arrives at a Paris train station in miserable weather, fast asleep and penniless. She has lost all of her money gambling in Monte Carlo; all she has is her gorgeous evening gown. She wakes up, wryly comments, "So this, as they say, is Paris, huh?," covers her head with a newspaper, and darts off into the rain to seek her fortune--the master of her situation.

Although Colbert was at the height of her stardom during the late 1930s, she made few good pictures thereafter. Film historians have speculated that her choice of roles was limited because she failed to establish a working liaison with a top-flight director--similar to Marlene Dietrich's relationship with Josef von Sternberg, or John Wayne's with John Ford. Although she was respected by her colleagues, she had a reputation for being "incredibly professional but not at all pliable" (quoted in Everson, p. 24); always diligent that she look her best on the screen, her contracts stipulated that she would not work after five p.m., when she became tired, and she generally refused to have the right side of her face photographed (she believed that her nose looked crooked from that angle). Her reputation for inflexibility probably impeded her film career in the 1940s, when she appeared primarily in mediocre comedies, including several with Fred MacMurray. Her most important film during the decade was Since You Went Away (1944), a typically glossy David O. Selznick production about the American home front during World War II; she was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of a mother. But she also withdrew from two fine films that might have bolstered her career: State of the Union (1947), after a disagreement with director Frank Capra, and All About Eve (1950), after she injured herself shortly before the production began.

After making a handful of weak pictures in the early 1950s, Colbert turned her attention to television and the stage. She made guest appearances on several television programs and starred in a special production of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit on CBS. In 1956 she returned to Broadway, replacing Margaret Sullavan in Janus. In 1958 she costarred with Charles Boyer in the hit play The Marriage Go-Round, which ran for 450 performances. During the late 1950s she hosted a television documentary program, "Women," which dealt with topical problems affecting American women. In 1961 she made an unfortunate final film, Parrish, a soap-operatic drama intended to build the career of Troy Donahue. In 1963 she announced her retirement from films and her intention to continue on stage. She divided her free time between her homes in Barbados and Manhattan, with her husband, Joel Pressman, a surgeon whom she had married in 1935; they had no children and remained married until his death in 1968. She continued to appear occasionally on Broadway until she was in her late seventies. Newspaper critics who commented on her performances invariably mentioned that she looked much younger than her years; after a lifetime of taking exquisitely good care of herself, she remained svelte and energetic. In 1987 she made a well-received television movie, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. She died in Barbados.