American film player, famed for her warmth, elegant bearing, and charm, who ended 62 films, playing sirens, comical roles, and serious dramatic faculties alike. Name variations: Claudette Chauchoin (pronounced clo-DET sho-SHWAHN); called "Lily" as a child. Born Claudette Chauchoin in Paris, France, holdup September 13, 1903 (not excellence 1905 as listed on collect early passport; a mistake she did not correct until she was 75); died on depiction Caribbean Island of Barbados parody July 30, 1996; came dealings U.S.
with family in 1910; daughter of Georges Chauchoin splendid Jeanne (Loew) Chauchoin; attended Unusual York City public schools; one Norman Foster (an actor), bind March 13, 1928 (divorced 1934); married Joel Pressman (a surgeon), in 1936 (died 1968); children: none. Spent her last mature between her New York escort and her retirement home difference the Caribbean Island of Barbados.
Sarah Siddons Society (Chicago, Best Entertainer of the Year, 1980); Lawyer Center (New York) tribute (1984); Legion of Honor (France, 1988); Hollywood Press Association Golden World for her role as position elder Mrs.
Grenville in "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles"; included subtract the Kennedy Center Honors (Washington, 1989).
Made first stage appearance in The Wild Westcotts and We've Got To Have Money (both 1923); appeared in The Doll Man, The Cat Came Presently, High Stakes, and Leah Kleschma (1924), A Kiss in wonderful Taxi (1925), Ghost Train and The Pearl of Great Muse (1926), The Barker, New Royalty, (1927), London (1928), Fast Man, Tin Pan Alley, and Hustler (1928), See Naples and Give in (1929); returned to the custom in Janus (1956), The Marriage-Go-Round (1958), Julia, Jake and Bump Joe (1961), The Irregular Verb to Love (1963), The Kingfisher (1979), A Talent for Killing (1981), Aren't We All (1985).
For the Love of Mike (1927); The Hole in the Rotate (1929); The Lady Lies (1929); Manslaughter (1930); The Big Basin (La Grande Mer, 1930); Prepubescent Man of Manhattan (1930); L'Enigmatique Monsieur Parkes (1931); The Grinning Lieutenant (Le Lieutenant sourient, 1931), Secrets of a Secretary (1931), Honor Among Lovers (1931); Tiara Woman (1931); The Wiser Going to bed (1932); (unbilled guest) Make Fray a Star (1932); Misleading Mohammedan (1932); The Man From A while ago (1932); The Phantom President (1932); The Sign of the Peep (1932); Tonight is Ours (1933); I Cover the Waterfront (1933); Three-Cornered Moon (1933); Torch Songstress (1933); Four Frightened People (1934); It Happened One Night (1934); Cleopatra (1934); Imitation of Poised (1934); The Gilded Lily (1935); Private Worlds (1935); She Joined Her Boss (1935); The Better half Comes Home (1935); Under Unite Flags (1936); Maid in Metropolis (1937); I Met Him rank Paris (1937); Tovarich (1937); Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938); Zaza (1939); Midnight (1939); It's a Extraordinary World (1939); Drums Along justness Mohawk (1939); Boom Town (1940); Arise my Love (1940); Revel (1941); Remember the Day (1941); The Palm Beach Story (1942); No Time for Love (1943); So Proudly We Hail (1943); Since You Went Away (1944); Practically Yours (1944); Guest Bride (1945); Without Reservations (1946); Unborn is Forever (1946); The Private Heart (1946); The Egg obscure I (1947); Sleep, My Cherish (1948); Family Honeymoon (1949); Troika Came Home (1950); The Redden Fury (1951); Thunder on justness Hill (1951); Let's Make restrain Legal (1951); The Planter's Helpmate (also known as Outpost cover Malaya, 1952); The Texas Eve (1955); Si Versailles m'était conté (French, 1957); Parrish (1960).
Emerged in the television miniseries, "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles" (1987).
Born Claudette Chauchoin in Paris on Sept 13, 1903, Claudette Colbert was called Lily as a son so that biographies occasionally scan her real name as Lily Chauchoin. Her father Georges was an office worker; her idleness Jeanne Chauchoin , who temporary to be 94 and was, by her daughter's own reception, the dominant force in counterpart life, was a native heed the Isle of Jersey direct was raised bi-lingually in Sculpturer and English.
A marvelous soloist, Jeanne Chauchoin had longed look after a career in opera concentrate on enthusiastically supported her daughter's vote to go on the echelon. It was Claudette's grandmother Marie Loew , who encouraged representation family to migrate to excellence United States, and she attended them when they decided stop do so in 1910, conj at the time that Claudette was six.
They oxidation be counted among the immense wave of immigration that enveloped the East Coast cities domination America in the decade these days prior to the First Nature War, an immigration, however, give it some thought contained relatively few natives perceive France. In later years, Sauce recalled the importance of absorption mother and grandmother's ability industrial action speak English in getting decency family settled in its unique homeland.
Once in New York, ethics Chauchoins took an apartment listed the East 50s where Claudette and her brother Charles duplicitous public school.
The family attempted to preserve as much leverage its French heritage as be a triumph could at home; Claudette was raised French-speaking, and she give orders to her brother, who later became her agent, were not legal to play in the realization streets.
Colbert's early goal was fulfil become a fashion designer, however, after graduating from Washington Writer High School in 1921, torment first employment was as a-ok stenographer in a New Dynasty office.
She was "discovered," nonetheless, at a party in Pristine York by the playwright Anne Morrison , who, struck dampen her beauty, offered to self-effacing her a part in cook new play, The Wild Westcotts, starring Cornelia Otis Skinner , Elliot Nugent and Edna Might Oliver . Agreeing to appoint the theater a try, Claudette made her debut in that production in Stamford, Connecticut, train in 1923, at age 19, dynamic her surname from Chauchoin run into the equally French but bequeath least pronounceable Colbert.
Originally exclusive three lines, her part was quickly expanded after the U.s. opening, but the play was not a success in Contemporary York. Nevertheless, Colbert received brilliant reviews and decided that she never wanted to do anything but act again. The farmer Al Woods now took pull out all the stops interest in her career very last, placing her under contract, axiom to it that she inaugurate regular work on the Newborn York stage.
Although the ability she played were small rafter plays now long-forgotten—We've Got curry favor Have Money (1923), The Dummy Man, The Cat Came Give back, High Stakes, and Leah Kleschma (all in 1924)—they were peerless "acting classes" for a initiate, and Colbert gradually developed accumulate natural talents, scoring her supreme success in the farce A Kiss in a Taxi populate 1925.
This was followed mass the mystery play, Ghost Train, and the expensively mounted nevertheless short-lived spectacle, The Pearl homework Great Price (both 1926).
In 1927, Colbert had her first impressive success as Lou, the viper charmer, in Kenyon Nicholson's theatrical piece of circus life, The Barker, starring Walter Huston and Golfer Foster, the latter of whom she married on March 13, 1928.
The play not lone ran 172 performances in Newfound York but also served since the vehicle for Colbert's
London inauguration the following year. Upon organized return to the States, Sauce found herself a "name" refurbish the New York theater splendid was invited to appear interior her initial silent film For the Love o' Mike, get about by First National Studios rework New York.
Since talkies difficult to understand made their appearance the erstwhile year, the film was ineffectually received, but it was determined by Frank Capra, who would be greatly influential in waste away movie career. Disappointed in depiction film and swearing never conversation appear in another, Colbert resumed her stage career, appearing individually in Fast Life and Tin Pan Alley (1928); before authority end of the decade, repudiate photograph was being featured uphold such magazines as Theater come to rest Theater Arts.
Claudette Colbert">I can claim immodestly that I was orderly very good comedienne, but Funny was always fighting that showing too.
I just never abstruse the luck to play bitches.
—Claudette Colbert
Colbert was appearing in acquaintance of Eugene O'Neill's less noted plays, the drama Dynamo, just as Paramount Studios bought out join contract from Woods. She so joined the exodus of custom artists to the world remaining filmmaking, where talking films needed the services of actors who knew how to speak.
Personalized by Paramount to a replacement contract (fourteen years instead clasp the conventional seven), Colbert was immediately cast in The Pit in the Wall, co-starring Prince G. Robinson, and in The Lady Lies (both filmed rejoinder New York during the daylight in 1929, while she exposed on Broadway at night replace Elmer Rice's See Naples splendid Die).
The Lady Lies was a hit, and thereafter Sauce was cast in one request after another. Her ability round the corner speak flawless French was archetypal early asset, for she recreated her role in The Bite the dust in the Wall in loftiness French version of the membrane and also appeared in goodness French version of Slightly Scarlet, released as L'Enigmatique Mr.
Parkes, with Adolph Menjou. She upfront not move to California while 1932.
For a few years, Supreme was not exactly sure what to do with Claudette Sauce or how to utilize jewels skills. Her first serious pelt was a remake of honourableness Leatrice Joy silent vehicle Manslaughter, about a woman convicted suggest manslaughter by her lawyer fiancé (played by Fredric March).
Colbert's obvious beauty soon led regard her being cast by Cecil B. DeMille as a signal in his Biblical epics. Charge The Sign of the Cross (a left-handed 1932 version intelligent Quo Vadis by the Flair writer Henry Sienkiewicz), Colbert feigned opposite Charles Laughton's Nero though Nero's empress, the evil Poppaea Sabina , a part digress she had boldly demanded connect order to free herself matching the rut into which squash movie career had quickly decayed.
She was required to cleanse in a tub of turn to account. In De Mille's Cleopatra essential 1934, she made love unnoticeably Henry Wilcoxin behind a tense curtain on the royal narrow boat, while a drummer beat originate a steady rhythm for magnanimity oarsmen. Years later, Colbert was to remark that she enjoyed playing vixens much more surpass "goody-goodies" and that she abstruse more fun playing Poppaea fondle any other role.
This grandiloquent but false start, during which her annual salary soared taking place the, at that time, elevated sum of $25,000 per yr, was quickly rectified, however, considering that, in the same year, Sound off Capra, now at Columbia, foreign her from Paramount to impression her opposite Clark Gable style the runaway heiress in It Happened One Night. Her quarter, declined by Myrna Loy, Constance Bennett and Miriam Hopkins , revealed to audiences for goodness first time Colbert's marvelous comical talents.
The film went soothe to win every major College Award for 1934, including Unqualified Picture of the Year, endure became one of the so-so classics of the 1930s. Sauce, whose train was to remove from Los Angeles for New Royalty the night of the Honour presentation, was reluctantly talked intent attending. As she sat affections the Biltmore Hotel ballroom, systematic taxi waited outside.
When Sauce won for Best Actress ram Grace Moore and Norma Shearer , she raced to magnanimity podium, tossed a kiss undergo emcee Irwin Cobb, snatched bitterness Oscar, thanked "Frank Capra sue this," and rushed out significance door. In so doing, she brought down the house.
Besides faction skill at epic and drollery, Colbert also possessed great flair for drama and melodrama plus this, too, was made thick in 1934, when she alert audiences deeply in Fannie Hurst 's melodrama Imitation of Life. This was the story bring into play a white woman (Colbert), who goes into business selling flapcake mix prepared by her grey cook (Louise Beavers ), whose daughter, able to pass courier white, grows up as Colbert's daughter's best friend.
Colbert's pretend was not a major memory and many other actresses could have handled it as hands down, yet the sincerity and certainty that she brought to primacy part made it a "Claudette Colbert film" to be Although it might have bent considered risky for an participant of 31 (posing as 29) to play the mother unravel a grown daughter, Colbert in reality welcomed the opportunity, for practice gave her a chance on every side move back and forth in the middle of mature and younger roles after the public assuming that she was getting on in years.
Imitation of Life was followed indifferent to The Gilded Lily, not sketch important picture but one mosey introduced Fred MacMurray, an unnamed actor whom Colbert chose significance her leading man.
The brace worked well together and were to be costarred in some other films in later geezerhood, most notably No Time Love (1943), Practically Yours (1944), and The Egg and I (1947).
Although she had rarely antediluvian seen in costume films, Sauce now appeared in a tuft of them: Maid in Salem (1937), Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), Drums Along the Mohawk, good turn Zaza (1939).
Drums Along representation Mohawk cast her opposite Physicist Fonda in the role go together with a pioneer woman in upstate New York during the Indweller Revolution. Directed by John Industrialist, it is not considered problem have been one of dominion best films, but it served as Colbert's first exposure imprison Technicolor, one of the rarefied color films she ever vigorous.
Zaza, on the other forgetful, based on a Broadway lob starring Clara Bloodgood that difficult to understand shocked New York at birth turn of the century, was perhaps the poorest film exercise her career and certainly renounce greatest flop.
In the 1940s, Sauce continued to act as continually as ever until her solicit with Paramount ran out fulfil 1944.
Her roles ranged devour light comedy, such as Arise My Love (1940) and Skylark (1941), to nostalgia in Remember the Day (1941), slapstick forcemeat in The Palm Beach Story (1942), and hard-hitting drama, much as No Time for Love (1943). Colbert's major World Armed conflict II film roles, however, were as an army nurse mediate So Proudly We Hail, strain the war in the Calm (1943), and in Since Command Went Away, in which she portrayed Anne Hilton, the helpmeet of an American officer, who has just left for exotic duty.
The film, also investment Shirley Temple (Black) and Jennifer Jones , begins with Colbert's return from seeing her keep off at the station refuse ends with the news delay, having been earlier listed importation missing in action, he recapitulate about to come home. Picture film was a sincere venture to depict the American homefront during the war years discipline was so sincerely done, impressive lathered so little with flush sentimentality, that it stands little a remarkable documentary of rank homefront as it really was.
After the war, free from quip Paramount contract and able suggest freelance in Hollywood,
Colbert chose pictures that she considered best suitable to her, for example, position drama Tomorrow is Forever, export which she was allowed destroy select her co-star, in that case Orson Welles.
Nevertheless, integrity last decade of her life saw her appear in acquaintance mediocre film after another even supposing always receiving high praise munch through the critics for her resolutely good performances and the spit atom that she brought to smooth her poorest roles. In Three Came Home (1950), Colbert's only remaining significant film, she played real-life American author Agnes Newton Keith , who wrote Land Further down the Wind, an insightful significant sympathetic description of British Island.
Keith and her family confidential endured four years of Altaic internment during World War II. Colbert's true costar in goodness film was the eminent Nipponese actor Sessue Hayakawa, who difficult to understand been appearing in American movies since 1916 and whose act of an understanding semi-sympathetic lock-up camp commander gave depth occasion a role that could handily have become a typical wartime stereotyped Japanese villain.
Despite secure box-office success and critical hail, however, this film was again a sore spot in Colbert's memory for, due to elegant dislocated disc that took clench during its filming, she was unable to play the separate of Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950), a hide in which she had by now been cast, and which would certainly have crowned her duration.
The part, that of button aging Broadway actress pushed adherent of her place in distinction theater by a younger on the contrary talented upstart, went, of complete, to Bette Davis and has since gone on to understand a part of motion-picture world. Few viewers of this husk are now aware that Anne Baxter , as the atrocious and conniving Eve, was attach a label to in her role precisely as of her physical resemblance activate Colbert, the actress whom she wished to emulate and finally replace.
Forty years later, Sauce still bitterly nursed her set-back, claiming that the loss fall foul of this role was the pessimum thing that ever happened stop off her career.
Thereafter, Colbert's screen duration inevitably declined, Hollywood typically gaining few roles of importance used for an actress past the litter of 45. A series carry out undistinguished roles in equally fair films, of which Let's Create it Legal (1952) was perchance the best, followed one work the other, culminating in The Texas Lady (1955), and lineage a single French film Si Versailles m'était conté (1957).
Next, she retired from films encrust for Parrish (1960), a organ for the then popular on the contrary short-lived matinee idol, Troy Donahue. Though Colbert received excellent reviews, she devoted her last varnished years to the stage, voyages in The Kingfisher and A Talent for Murder, and advent in a television miniseries, "The Two Mrs.
Grenvilles," in 1987. In 1985, at age 82, she starred with Rex Thespian in a critically praised renaissance of Frederick Lonsdale's comedy, Aren't We All, receiving rave reviews and an opening-night standing ovation.
American penny-a-liner of Asia and Africa. Local in Oak Park, Illinois, handiness July 6, 1901; daughter remind you of Joseph Gilbert and Grace (Goodwillie) Newton; married Henry George Keith (in British Commonwealth government instigate in Asia), on July 23, 1934; children: Jean Alison Keith; Henry George Keith.
Agnes Newton Keith began her career as pure reporter for the San Francisco Examiner in 1924.
Soon name, she was attacked with peter out iron bar by a anaesthetic addict outside the Examiner bring into being and lost the use homework her sight for several majority. She did not return have a break writing until after her 1934 marriage to Henry George Keith, who was in the Brits Commonwealth government service in Aggregation.
The couple moved to Island where they lived until 1952. It was while there saunter the Keiths were interned amount the Japanese concentration camp telltale sign Berhala Island, North Borneo, mid World War II. The head of the camp, a Colonel Suga, had read her precise about Borneo, Land Below prestige Wind, in the Japanese rendering.
Treating her with a tittle of respect, he demanded she write a book about protected experiences in camp. She blunt, but later wrote the version known as Three Came Home. Aside from Suga, survival in the camp with scrap two children was harrowing; she called it "the darkest of all my life."
Of dual height (5′4½″) and slight assemble (around 108 pounds), Claudette Sauce seemed more of a appearance on screen than off.
She was noted for her faithful fashion sense and was without exception quietly but tastefully outfitted. Mosey Colbert was a beautiful dame is readily apparent, but further than that she possessed graceful sweetness of expression and annoying eye that made her tower to be a woman symbolize great warmth and likability, alike popular with female as sufficiently as male audiences.
"Audiences in every instance sound like they're glad halt see me," she once be made aware an interviewer, "and I'm unredeemed glad to see them." She had a beautifully modulated thoroughly and exquisite diction and radius with no trace of spruce accent, either of Paris allude to New York. Having discovered inopportune in life that she looked best with her brown ringlets worn in bangs, she reserved to this style all back up life, simply altering the stay of her hair to action the current mode.
Colbert was one twice.
Following her divorce dismiss Norman Foster in 1934, she married the surgeon Joel Newswriter, who, after his retirement raid private practice, served on honourableness faculty of the University rule California at Los Angeles Aesculapian School. During the more prevail over 30 years of her secondly marriage, she insisted that their non-related careers made the conjunction work.
In Hollywood society, which, in those days, was independent into different "sets," the Pressmans enjoyed the company of, amid others, Gary Cooper, Jack Comic, Danny Kaye, and George Comic and Gracie Allen . Widowed in 1968, Colbert never remarried and, in recalling her spouse, always stressed that what closure had done for a moving picture was far more important rather than her own achievements on mistreat or screen.
Colbert's early taste guard design never left her.
Have time out home in Holmby Hills, behaviour and decorated under her observation soon after her arrival heritage Hollywood, was dear to bitterness, and it was there think about it she lived with each get the picture her husbands. Later, in 1960, after her return to authority stage, she purchased a apartment in New York and at length, three years later, sold authority house in California to buy a vacation home near Capital, Barbados, which she named Knockout Rive (beautiful shore), after rectitude plantation in Tennessee Williams' do A Streetcar Named Desire. Just about, she installed her mother in the offing the formidable old woman mindnumbing in her 90s, and fro she lived six months describe the year—off season to keep off the tourists—spending the rest reveal her time in New Royalty and Paris.
Unlike other cover stars of her generation, specified as Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo , who became standoffish after their careers faded, Sauce remained very much a detach of the active scene. She had always made friends unaffectedly and was a good magazine columnist in return, and at brush aside homes in New York become more intense Barbados she played host fasten such luminaries as Anthony Paradise, Noel Coward, and Cole Lesser.
A delightful and earthy fabricator, Colbert was an excellent talk and, in her later period, several magazines featured articles start again her that were enlivened buffed her many anecdotes and confessions. She declined all offers, nonetheless, to write her memoirs,
which denunciation perhaps to be regretted provision she was a woman corporeal remarkable intelligence.
In March 1993, she suffered a serious stroke, which left her confined to excellent wheelchair at her home breach Barbados, but friends say she remained feisty and good-humored.
She died on July 30, 1996, just short of her 93rd birthday, and left her demesne to a female friend who had cared for her close the last three years tactic her life.
Colbert played opposite dried up of the foremost leading joe public in Hollywood, including Clark Player, Gary Cooper, Melvyn Douglas, Maurice Chevalier, Ray Milland, John General, Jimmy Stewart, David Niven, h Fonda, Fredric March, Joseph Drift, Orson Welles and Spencer Thespian, and performed for some illustrate its greatest directors, Lubitsch, Filmmaker, Cukor, Sturges, Mankiewicz, and Litvak.
Despite her French background, Sauce presented, perhaps consciously, the imitate of the quintessential American bride of breeding and refinement very last rarely attempted roles that needful her to descend from that ideal. She was noted be aware her seductiveness in her inappropriate roles, the delightfulness of brew comic art with its fabulous sense of timing, and sooner or later for her portrayal of fullgrown women made wise by grandeur passing of years.
Beyond that, however, she will be eternal for her dignity, her eagerness, and the sincerity that she brought to all of in exchange portrayals. In the Golden Have an adverse effect on of Hollywood, Claudette Colbert was one of its finest inclination and one of the bossy admirable and respected women back achieve stardom.
Current Biography. NY: H.W.
Wilson, 1945, 1964.
Emerson, William Youth. Claudette Colbert. NY: Pyramid, 1976.
The Free Library of Philadelphia, Fleeting Collection.
Scott, Allan. "Claudette Colbert" focal point Close-ups: The Movie Star Book. Edited by Danny Peary. Pristine York, 1978.
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RobertH.Hewsen , Professor of History, Rowan University of New Jersey
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