Decorum and composure were always the order of her day. From early on there was a grace and wit and style about her. Watching her on the screen one finds a vivacity in her performances and always so much kindness.
I stop short of calling her beautiful although she had an unusual but attractive look with her apple-shaped face, big eyes and high cheekbones. She also had great legs. She usually kept her hair in that short bob with its signature bangs that likely helped create a familiar feeling that folks seem to have about her.
For all her lady-like ways, she was a tough woman, truly a steel magnolia. She was highly professional. She knew her lines, was always prompt and always serious about her work. She expected others to be the same. During her heyday she worked with so many of the same people over and over and a system of working was established. A young Gary Cooper said he was afraid of her. Gary Cooper! She knew everything about her looks, including how she should be lighted. She is famous for being filmed only from a left angle or straight on but rarely the right (and yet here comes a right-angle one). Due to a slight bump of her nose, she felt she photographed poorly on the right. Whole sets were sometimes rebuilt to accommodate this issue.
 |
| Late high school years |
As a young child, she was already sweet and charming and determined. Born Emilie Claudette Chauchoin in France in 1903, her father was a baker and her mother never wanted to be anything but an opera singer. The family moved to Manhattan when Lily (as she was called for years) was three. While there was a theatricality about her, her interests were more toward painting and later fashion designing.
In 1919 a friend encouraged her to audition for a play, The Widow's Veil, at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village and she snagged a role. Giving French lessons provided some extra cash. A bit later she got her first Broadway role in The Wild Westcotts and was forever smitten with the stage. It was at this time that she changed her name to Claudette Colbert.
She found the success she was hoping for by appearing in one Broadway production after another. In 1928 she married one of her leading men, Norman Foster (later a movie & TV director), and for the seven years of their marriage, they never lived together. But as Colbert purred... we lived near one another. Colbert continued living with her mother who was always a dominant force in her life.
While still living in New York, she made her first movie, For the Love of Mike (1927), her only silent film, directed by Frank Capra who would one day help add even more luster to her professional standing. Her constant work and exposure to New York audiences attracted the attention of Paramount Pictures who signed Colbert and Foster to contracts. They still worked in the east for a while but it became obvious to all that California was in their future.
Reviewing the numbers, Colbert made around 60 movies and I have seen about 16 of them. I didn't catch her first 17 films nor could I particularly say I've ever heard of them. She also made seven films with Fred MacMurray and I always was pretty good at avoiding his work.
Of the ones I have seen, I have enjoyed them all and three of them I have outlined in these pages via their own postings. More to the point, I find, is that Colbert herself was never the draw that got me to her films. It was the films themselves that were the lure. For example, I wouldn't have cared who played the frightened wife in Drums Along the Mohawk (and for the record, I think she was miscast)... nothing would have kept me from seeing it.
Neither Colbert nor Paramount bigshot Cecil B. DeMille may have known that he was going to give her career a shot of adrenaline when, passing her by on the lot, said how would you like to play the wickedest woman in the world? She said she would and she signed on to play Poppaea, Nero's lustful wife in DeMille's rather outlandish The Sign of the Cross (1932). Religious epics have never been my thing and this one is just so over the top and dated now as well. I'm sure Colbert gave it her all but in retrospect especially, she just seems so wrong. She's just not the wicked sexpot type, and she knew it, too, although she would try it one more time, again for DeMille.
In terms of her career, she made three important movies in 1934. Neither she nor Clark Gable wanted to make It Happened One Night. Not only did they think the story of a runaway heiress and the reporter who meets up with her was too lightweight and too B but neither of them was the first choice for the roles. Furthermore, they would both be loaned out to cheap Columbia, away from their comfortable home studios. And if that's not enough, Frank Capra would again be directing her and she was none too crazy about him from the first time.
Let's get this over with, Gable apparently said on his first day and when the filmed wrapped, Colbert said I just finished making the worst picture I've ever made. Ha, what do they know? It was the first of Oscar's so-called clean sweeps... awards for best picture, best director, best actor and best actress. It was immensely popular with the public to boot.
The same could be said for Imitation of Life, the mother-daughter weepie that would be made into an even better, although glossier, version with Lana Turner in 1959. This film undoubtedly set Colbert on the road to some sensitive mother roles.
DeMille insisted that she play Cleopatra and it was one more huge crowd-pleaser. In the early 60s we would hear about it again when Elizabeth Taylor gave us her version. Again, like her role in Sign of the Cross, she was perfectly fine, I suppose, but I could have come up with a half dozen names I would have chosen over Colbert. She herself said that she would never again play a character so overtly sexual and she (wisely) never did.
She had made the climb to the top and she'd only been making movies for seven years and had been a Hollywood resident for less than that. She had already become a shrewd businesswoman. Her brother became her agent and her domineering mother was always in the background. Once questioned about whether she knew what she was doing, she responded with I've been in the Claudette Colbert business a long time.
In 1935, she divorced Foster, whom her mother disliked, and a few months later married Joel Pressman, a throat specialist and surgeon at U.C.L.A. They would be married until his death in 1968. She was an exquisite mother on screen but never had children in real life.
 |
| A little silliness with Dietrich |
She was all she needed to be in dramas but her great gift as an actress was the skill she brought to light comedy. She made many of them (I'm sure most of the MacMurray flicks were comedies-- does The Egg and I sound like a drama to you?) and along with It Happened One Night, there was Midnight (1939). She plays a stranded, rather bumbling American showgirl in Paris who gets caught up in several schemes to earn money. Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett wrote a deft screenplay and she nabbed Don Ameche, John Barrymore and Mary Astor as her costars. Frequent Colbert director, Mitchell Leisen, knew just how to handle her. He maintained good listening skills.
Don't confuse It's A Wonderful World (1939) with It's A Wonderful Life in 1946 despite the fact that Jimmy Stewart is in both of them. He plays a private eye who is tracking a criminal and unwittingly becomes an accessory and Colbert owns the car that Stewart steals. (Sounds like a comedic 3 Days of the Condor). It's too bad they didn't make more films together-- so kinda cute were they-- but she was on loanout to MGM, Stewart's home base, so that just wasn't going to happen.
There was Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) to round out the thirties but we gave it our best in an earlier posting. There's also been an earlier posting on Boom Town, her first film of the 1940s. Surprisingly she accepted a lesser role and third-billing in the story of oilmen that took on soap opera tones. Most of the screen time went to Gable and Spencer Tracy. To make Colbert's role even more colorless, there was Hedy Lamarr. Interestingly, she had turned down the Rosalind Russell part opposite Cary Grant in His Girl Friday to make Boom Town.
With the 1940s, of course, came a lot of war films from all the studios. Colbert would do her share. As she had with Stewart, there was perfect chemistry with John Payne in the romance-war story, Remember the Day (1941). It's more or less a forgotten film which is too bad because its loving approach to the bittersweet lives of two teachers is most appealing.
 |
| A key comedy scene in The Palm Beach Story |
She turned down a chance to be another DeMille heroine in his Reap the Wild Wind so that she could assume the lead in Preston Sturges' great screwball comedy, The Palm Beach Story (1942). Joel McCrea (another perfect partner for our lady) plays a poor inventor who needs a wad of cash to get his new creation off the ground. Devoted wife Colbert divorces him so that she can find a Florida millionaire and provide the loot. Implausible, yes, but Sturges knew his way around outrageous comedies and this is one of his best. I also regard it as Colbert's best comedy ever... take that (!) It Happened One Night.
So Proudly We Hail (1943) was Paramount's salute to the nurses stationed on Bataan during WWII. Colbert is the head nurse with a talented group of actresses, including Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake, as those who report to her. Lake probably had the best role. A story of women in war was unusual and rather heart-warming. Colbert, who detested negative stories about her, got into a verbal fight with Goddard over something silly. Paramount likely didn't care for two of their biggest stars squabbling.
Although Paramount's star costume designer, Edith Head, didn't work on So Proudly We Hail, she did once say that of all the actresses for whom she designed wardrobes, Colbert and Goddard were her least favorites. Both were notoriously picky. It is recalled that Colbert once wanted to be a fashion designer.
Since You Went Away (1944) is my favorite Colbert film. She shines as the mother of Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple trying to make a wartime go of it while the husband-father is off to war and ultimately declared missing. I sang its growing praises earlier.
Colbert took a few hits for her performance opposite Orson Welles, George Brent and 8-year old Natalie Wood in Tomorrow Is Forever (1946). It is a WWI story of a soldier who returns home after 20 years to find that his wife had remarried. Critics thought she didn't dig deep enough to portray the torn wife, instead relying on her usual bag of tricks.
The Secret Heart (1946) concerned a recent widow who has to deal with the antics of her disturbed stepdaughter. Despite its soap opera overtones, I liked it especially because it gave June Allyson her first shot at drama. Colbert and Walter Pidgeon took a surprising back seat to Allyson. In real life the two women became life-long friends with Colbert becoming godmother to Allyson's daughter.
Three Came Home (1950), another war tale, is based on the life of married American writer, Agnes Keith, who was separated from her husband in 1941 Borneo and captured by the Japanese. It is a good film that might have done better had the male lead been played by someone with more box office clout than Patric Knowles (although he is good). During a rape scene (decidedly tamed down for 1950 standards) with a Japanese soldier, Colbert seriously wrenched her back. That injury cost her the lead in All About Eve and Bette Davis replaced her. I thought Colbert was a fine actress but hard as I try I cannot imagine her playing Margo Channing.
No one perhaps was then aware that she'd not have the lead in any more big movies. The 1950s saw a definite decline in her few films. They were B movies unworthy of her and even they were left to history by 1955. She took it in stride... she usually did. She would return to the Broadway stage most happily in several outings over the years. She would also do a great deal of television, not the half-hour stuff but prestigious projects. It may be that the first time I ever saw Colbert was in Noel Coward's TV special, Blithe Spirit (1956), co-starring him and Lauren Bacall. I'd love to see it again.
With no movies on the horizon and with most of her television projects coming out of Manhattan, Colbert moved back there. Pressman, however, stayed in California a few more years before joining her. By 1960 she was dividing her time between New York and Barbados where she and Pressman purchased an 18th century plantation overlooking the sea. I knew I had to live there the moment the plane landed, she said. Later on her homes would include a flat in Paris.
It's been said that the ever-attentive Colbert knew when to walk away from Hollywood but I've always suspected Hollywood walked away from her. She's included here, in this 1930's salute, because she belongs to that decade and also the 40's. In other words, she's a celebrated member of Hollywood's Golden Age. Bless her. But her type of performing, her war films and adorable comedies just didn't seamlessly forge on.
I was just learning about her at the time it was becoming apparent she was no longer making movies. I was kind of obsessive about learning about the older stars but I was hip to movies and actors of my generation as well... which brings us to Parrish (1961).
I don't know what brought her back to the movies (maybe to pay for all those plush homes?). And why this tobacco-farming soaper that shined its cameras more on the younger set (Troy Donahue, Connie Stevens, Diane McBain and Sharon Hugueny) than the older pro Oscar winners (Colbert, Karl Malden and Dean Jagger) struck her fancy is a mystery. Don't misread this at all... I loved Parrish but why did she want to make it? Did she want to establish a relationship with younger audiences? Was she looking to resume her career? Whatever it was, she soon changed her tune. As Donahue's mother, she said he treated her like an old lady and added that he finished her off in the movies. She never made another one for the big screen.
Maybe those not looking didn't know about Garbo and Dietrich, one deeply closeted but obvious and the other obvious because she was quite noisy about it, but Hollywood film fanatics, gay and straight, certainly knew. But there were others. I have long concluded that Colbert belonged in with Stanwyck, Hepburn and Jean Arthur and those who were never particularly comfortable chatting up their personal lives.
What's all this say for Pressman? She was married to him for 33 years. Well, gosh, it's anyone's guess but the likelihood is he was also gay. It's just what they did in those days. A star needed a spouse and a suitable one could be found. Or maybe there's some other answer.
Asked occasionally to explain her long-term relationships with two female friends, Verna Hull and Helen O'Hagan (at different times), Colbert would usually say that they were paid help of some sort. At times she wanted folks to know that while she liked men, she preferred female companionship. After her husband died, she apparently informed her staff and friends that they were to treat O'Hagan as her spouse.
Twenty-six years after making Parrish, Colbert was ready to try it again, this time in a television miniseries. She actually fought for the role in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987), written by Dominic Dunne, because it had stunning parts for two actresses, one of them an imposing family matriarch. A dramatization of a real-life 1955 murder case, Colbert plays the wealthy mother-in-law of Ann- Margret who has murdered Colbert's son. Colbert knows she did it, too, but opts to help her get acquitted of the crime because of the stain it would bring to the family. She won some very deserved awards but would never act again.
In 1993 she suffered a debilitating stroke and then a series of smaller strokes over the next three years. She died of one in 1996 in her beloved Barbados home. A maid reported that she had been standing at her picture window looking out at the sea when she collapsed and died.
Next posting:
One of her coworkers at Paramount
Claudette Colbert's right-side profile is as equally attractive as her left-side profile. Ah, Hollywood!
ReplyDeleteI like Claudette. She is charming. But I prefer Lombard. And you?
ReplyDeleteDunno really. I certainly have seen CC in far more movies than CL. The latter died way too soon.
DeleteColbert has no neck
DeleteShe wouldn't like that you've noticed. LOL
DeleteNoël Coward on Claudette Colbert: "I'd wring her neck if I could find it."
ReplyDelete