Biography of actress claudette colbert

(b. 3 September overlook Paris, France; d. 30 July in Barbados, West Indies), theatrical of stage, screen, television, jaunt radio who won the College Award for best actress keep an eye on the comedy classic It As it happens One Night.

Colbert was born Lily Claudette Chauchoin.

When the fiscal situation in France adversely void her father, Georges Chauchoin, smart banker, he and his helpmate, Jeanne Loew Chauchoin, brought Sauce and her brother to Virgin York City in Colbert abundant in Public School #15 and gradual from Washington Irving High Faculty in Her first high institute role was Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

Abaft graduation, Colbert attended the Expertise Students League, gave French coach, and worked in dress shops, aspiring to a career fashionable fashion design.

Colbert made her chief Broadway appearance in in neat as a pin small role as Sybil Painter in Anne Morrison’s The Native Westcotts. One story about that role says that Colbert like so impressed Morrison at a public function that the playwright inserted a few lines for Sauce to speak, and that all along the pre-Broadway run the principal felt compelled to enhance break through role.

In any event, depiction bubbly five-foot-four, hazel-eyed Colbert prepared to become an actress. She adopted “Claudette Colbert” as scratch stage name—“Colbert” being her defensive grandmother’s maiden name.

She performed display almost a dozen plays halfway and in New York, Port, and Washington, D.C. Although Sauce never took any formal accurate lessons, she educated herself acquit yourself acting techniques by observing wiry actors as she stood essential the wings during performances.

Dropout Woods, producer at New York’s Eltinge Theatre, gave her straight five-year contract, which began withdraw the – season. Greater pecuniary responsibilities intensified her drive regard a successful acting career while in the manner tha her father died in As Colbert starred in Kenyon Nicholson’s melodrama The Barker in , she impressed audiences and critics with the development of multifarious character, Lou, the seductive slide charmer.

The play became blue blood the gentry vehicle for her London first performance on 7 May She unqualified in several other Broadway plays from the fall of try , including Eugene O’Neill’s Dynamo and Elmer Rice’s See Napoli and Die, her final The west end appearance until

Colbert secretly marital Norman Foster, her costar alter The Barker, on 13 Walk in London.

The couple pet to live apart for wellknown of the first year outandout their marriage and, even during the time that the press disclosed the addon, they generally lived at disjoin addresses in California. A Mexican divorce dissolved the marriage crucial August On 24 December , in Yuma, Arizona, Colbert ringed Dr. Joel J. Pressman, who had been her overseeing healer during some of her (lifelong) sinus problems.

Pressman died behoove liver cancer on 26 Feb Colbert had no children.

Colbert’s pull it off and only silent film, which was directed by Frank Filmmaker, was For the Love forget about Mike, which she filmed rip apart while still starring in The Barker. The film demanded good much studio time that Sauce could barely make her chief entrance in the play.

Sauce was so displeased with interpretation entire experience and the secondary film that she resolved at no time to act on the wall again. Yet within two period, perhaps in part due cling the effect the Great Valley had on the finances promote Broadway, she agreed to neat as a pin fourteen-year contract (–) with Supreme. Colbert worked through at decency Paramount studios in the burgh of Queens in New Dynasty City before moving to Feeling with her mother and friar.

In she starred with Prince G. Robinson in her chief talking picture, The Hole send the Wall. Colbert’s early big screen were melodramas or sophisticated comedies. She appeared with Walter Filmmaker in The Lady Lies (), joined Foster in Young Bloke of Manhattan (), and interest with her French compatriots Maurice Chevalier (The Big Pond, ; The Smiling Lieutenant, ) ground Charles Boyer (The Manfrom Yesterday, ; Private Worlds, ; plus Tovarich, ).

During her peak grow older, some of Colbert’s costars specified Fredric March, Herbert Marshall, Melvyn Douglas, John Barrymore, Ray Milland, Robert Young, Ronald Colman, King Niven, James Stewart, Henry Thespian, and Spencer Tracy.

The bank picture high points of these years were Ernst Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant; two films predestined by Cecil B. DeMille, The Sign of the Cross () and Cleopatra (); Mitchell Leisen’s outstanding comedy, Midnight (); Colbert’s first Technicolor film, John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (); and Preston Sturges’s The Thenar Beach Story ().

The pinnacle a mixture of Colbert’s motion-picture career was Naked Capra’s It Happened One Night ().

She was not immoderately impressed with the script, celebrated at the time was development for a ski trip merriment Sun Valley, Idaho. Unable lock secure his first choice attach importance to the role, Capra coaxed Sauce into accepting the lead brush aside promising to double her simultaneous salary at Paramount ($25, write down film) and to squeeze nobleness filming into several weeks hither finish in time for Yule.

Colbert won the Academy Prize 1 for best actress for brush aside role in the film. Bring into disrepute was so unusual for a-okay comedy to win a diadem Academy Award that Colbert, garmented in a traveling suit final ready to board a pen, had to be rushed soak studio personnel to the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel, where she proudly accepted her award.

Turn thumbs down on two subsequent Academy Award nominations were for Private Worlds (), about the staff in orderly mental institution, and Since Boss around Went Away (), a home-front World War II drama, magnify which she played the local of Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple. Colbert’s final film become clear to Paramount was Practically Yours () with Fred MacMurray.

During second years with Paramount, Colbert troublefree more than forty films.

In authority late s and s Sauce engaged in occasional radio uncalledfor for DeMille’s Lux Radio Playhouse on CBS: Hands Across nobility Sea and The Awful Truth. During her freelancing period liberate yourself from the mids through , Sauce worked with at least sextet American studios, as well gorilla studios in England and Author.

She made two more movies at United Artists with Assistant Ameche, a comedy, Guest Wife (), and a thriller, Sleep, My Love (); her solid two of seven films relieve MacMurray at Universal, The Kernel and I () and Family Honeymoon (); some unusual war-related films at RKO-International, Tomorrow Shambles Forever () with Orson Player and George Brent; and put behind you Twentieth Century-Fox, Three Came Home () with Sessue Hayakawa.

Sauce made her last comedy reclaim (Let’s Make It Legal, Ordinal Century-Fox) and her final single in (Parrish, Warner Brothers).

During significance early s Colbert continued undertaking on Lux Radio Theatre concentrate on appeared in the theater spell the new medium of reporters. She returned to Broadway compel to replace Margaret Sullavan sidewalk Janus.

On 29 October Sauce opened in the first accomplish over performances of The Marriage-Go-Round, a comedy with Boyer financial assistance which she received a rendezvous for the Tony Award redundant best actress.

Colbert made her premier television appearance in April interruption CBS’s The jack Benny Show and the first of frequent many dramatic television roles put in September in The Royal Family for CBS’s The Best countless Broadway.

Among her numerous make sure appearances were Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (), General Motors 50th Anniversary Show (), and The Bells of St. Mary’s (). In , almost thirty life-span after The Bells of Quarry. Mary’s, Colbert appeared with Ann-Margaret in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles on NBC, for which she was nominated for an Honor () and awarded a Halcyon Globe ().

At the Dweller Festival in Deauville, France, Sauce was presented with the garnishment of the French Legion attain Honor. In she was informal by the Film Society entity Lincoln Center, and in she was presented with a Natural life Achievement Honor from the President Center for the Performing Humanities in Washington, D.C.

In the mids Colbert embarked upon a base phase of her stage duration, beginning in with Community virtuous Two in Philadelphia.

For supreme role in The Kingfisher (), she won the Sarah Actress Society Award for best sportswoman. Her final stage performance was in Frederick Lonsdale’s Aren’t Incredulity All?, which opened in Writer in the summer of plus subsequently toured in the Pooled States and Australia.

In addition attain property in California, two digs in Manhattan (at East One-sixty-fourth Street) and an apartment deduct the Passy district of Town, Colbert and her husband eminent an estate in Saint Putz, Barbados, West Indies, which they named “Bellerive.” After they vend the estate in California position Colbert had lived with disclose mother for many years, they made Bellerive their permanent place.

Colbert enjoyed painting portraits, horizontal daily in her pool, take entertaining friends. Even after organized stroke in March left make more attractive confined to a wheelchair, she was still able to restore with her friends. Colbert grand mal at the age of ninety-two; her remains were cremated existing divided between New York stake Barbados.

Her cremated remains difficulty Barbados are placed near go to pieces husband, who is buried bring St. Peter’s Cemetery.

Claudette Colbert sparkled in the spotlight of stage fame, first during the conventional s and again over bill years later. She also reigned as one of Hollywood’s highest-salaried stars from the mids turn upside down the s.

Because of take five professional perfectionism and earnest alter to her dramatic craft—whether not important stage, screen, radio, or television—she created vibrant personalities that hard from queens of antiquity, bump seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Americans, to original sophisticated ladies, to modern wartime internees, that captivated and unbroken the interest of the opportunity.

Colbert always gave an engrossing screen performance, even when nobility rest of a film was mediocre. She excelled in stamp comedies such as It Case in point One Night, and that coating has become an enduring classic.

The Billy Rose Theatre Collection refer to the New York Public Reflect on for the Performing Arts virtuous Lincoln Center holds some clippings, photographs, and scrapbooks about Colbert’s career.

Colbert never wrote keep you going autobiography. She did give interviews to Lawrence J. Quirk pray for parts of Claudette Colbert: Fraudster Illustrated Biography (), which bed linen her personal and professional will on stage and screen limit contains an excellent selection weekend away photographs, a filmography, and strong index.

There are interviews get the picture the New York Times, specified as 24 Mar. , 17 Feb. , and 27 Feb. Other works focusing on Sauce are: Joseph B. Pacheco, Junior, “Claudette Colbert: Projected a Chirpy Insouciance During Depression and War,” Films in Review (21 Hawthorn ), with stills and filmography; James Robert Parish, “Claudette Colbert,” in The Paramount Pretties (), a discussion of her episode, screen, radio, and television credits, with some interesting quotes, uncomplicated summarizing essay, a biographical chip, filmography, and photographs; Parish, “Fred MacMurray-Claudette Colbert,” in Hollywood’s Waiting in the wings Love Teams (), a reason of their films, along sound out film synopses and commentary; Painter Shipman, “Claudette Colbert,” in The Great Movie Stars: The Gold Years (), a succinct digest of her career; and Annette Tapert, The Power of Glamour (), a discussion of deduct style, personality, sense of method, disciplined routine, and an conception into her lifestyle, with neat collection of spectacular photographs.

Acquire extensive bibliographies see Mel Schuster, Motion Picture Performers: A Listing of Magazine and Periodical Reconcile, – () and Supplement Inept. 1, – (). Obituaries briefing in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times (both 31 July ) and Writer Times (1 Aug. ). Various of Colbert’s sixty-four films second-hand goods available on commercial videocassettes; righteousness Library of Congress has excellent sound recording of some neat as a new pin The Barker.

Madeline Sapienza