Claudette Colbert
    Actress


    (1903-1996)


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      "I know what's best for me, after all I have been in the Claudette Colbert business longer than anybody."


      Although Colbert began her film career in 1927, she was a rather nondescript leading lady until 1932, when Cecil B. DeMille approached her with the offer: "Claudette, how would you like to play the wickedest woman in the world?" She jumped at the chance to play Poppea in The Sign of the Cross and DeMille brought out the haughty sensuality and earthy humor that finally set her apart from the crowd of die-cut screen ingenues. (The film also gave her one of her all-time sexiest roles, with a now-famous nude milk bath among its highlights.) She originally came to America in 1911 dreaming of a career in fashion design, but was persuaded to go on stage in 1923, and soon became a reliable Broadway leading lady. Colbert made her first film, the undistinguished For the Love of Mike (1927) for director Frank Capra, and signed with Paramount at the dawn of the sound era. Her first talkie, The Hole in the Wall (1929), was based on a 1920 play about a fake spiritualist and costarred Edward G. Robinson. She worked with Maurice Chevalier in The Big Pond (1930) and The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), and appeared with legendary stage star George M. Cohan in The Phantom President (1932), but failed to generate much excitement among movie fans. After Sign she took the lead in the seminal screwball comedy, Three-Cornered Moon (1933), which boosted her stock and gave audiences their first real taste of her comic skill.


    Claudette Colbert

      Following her appearance in DeMille's social comedy Four Frightened People (1934, as a plain Jane who gets more glamorous with each successive scene), Colbert was loaned to Columbia for Capra's It Happened One Night (also 1934), and won an unexpected Oscar for her canny, untheatrical comic performance as a spoiled rich kid on the run. Her famous "hitchhiking" scene (in which she exposed a shapely leg to stop a passing motorist), along with costar Clark Gable's reluctance to wear undershirts, made the Oscarwinning screwball comedy the talk of the nation. Her stardom cemented, Colbert played another classic femme fatale in DeMille's Cleopatra (1934). She snared an Oscar nomination for her tempered dramatic performance in the psychiatric drama Private Worlds (1935), but it was in comedy that Colbert found her most appreciative audiences. Vehicles like She Married Her Boss, The Gilded Lily, The Bride Comes Home (all 1935), Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), It's a Wonderful World and the delicious Midnight (both 1939) showed time and time again that she was one of the screen's leading light comediennes. Writer-director Preston Sturges took full advantage of that talent when he handed her the leading role in his deliriously funny The Palm Beach Story (1942). But Colbert managed to escape pigeonholing in Hollywood by taking on a variety of parts in dramatic films as well, from the costume dramas Maid of Salem (1937) and John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk (1939, which cast her as a frontier wife), to such high-grade weepers as Arise, My Love (1940, reportedly the actress' favorite film) and Remember the Day (1941).

      During World War 2, Colbert continued to make light comedies (1943's No Time for Love and 1945's Guest Wife for example) but also starred in patriotic exercises such as So Proudly We Hail (1943) and Since You Went Away (1944, for which she received her third Best Actress nomination as a courageous matriarch). After the war, she scored in two side-splitting comedies: Mervyn LeRoy's Without Reservations (1946), as an authoress in search of a "perfect man," and Chester Erskine's The Egg and I (1947), as an urban sophisticate plopped down in the middle of a chicken farm. Though she continued to give solid dramatic performances, in the psychological drama The Secret Heart (1946), the thriller Sleep, My Love (1948), and especially Three Came Home (1950), in which she movingly portrayed a prisoner of war, her vehicles became less interesting in the early 1950s, and her starring career petered out. (Her last starring film was 1955's Texas Lady and her last major appearance was as Troy Donahue's mother in 1961's Parrish.)

      Colbert found ample opportunities on the stage instead. She earned a 1959 Tony nomination for her work on Broadway in "The Marriage-Go-Round," and continued to tour in elegant stage vehicles right through the 1980s, working several times with Rex Harrison. In 1987 Colbert appeared with Ann-Margret in a two-part CBS TV miniseries, "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles," dazzling viewers with her ageless appearance and panache. After nearly 70 years as a performer, she announced her formal retirement in 1992. Her first husband was actor-director Norman Foster. They divorced in 1935, and she subsequently wed Dr. Joel Pressman, who died in 1968.




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      claudette colbert dvds



      claudette colbert videos



      claudette colbert

      dvds | videos

      laurence olivier | clark gable | vivien leigh | leslie howard | alfred hitchcock | robert montgomery | grace kelly | conrad veidt
      olivia de havilland | humphrey bogart | howard hawks | frank capra | charlie chaplin | lauren bacall | fritz lang
      jean harlow | greta garbo | ava gardner | audrey hepburn | edward g. robinson | john garfield
      erich von stroheim | wim wenders | madeleine carroll | marlene dietrich | rita hayworth




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