Claudette Colbert ( ; born Émilie Claudette Chauchoin; September 13, 1903 – July 30, 1996) was an American actress.

Colbert was famous for her light comedy as well as emotional drama. She became one of the biggest box-office stars of her time. In 1999, she was ranked as the 12th greatest female star of all time by the American Film Institute in their list AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars. Colbert once said to an interviewer, "Audiences always sound like they're glad to see me, and I'm damned glad to see them."

Early life 

Colbert was born on September 13, 1903, to Georges Cauchoin and his wife, the former Jeanne Loew. Her family emigrated to the United States and settled in New York City. She had one brother, Charles, who used the surname Wendling and went on to become his sister's agent. After her formal education ended, she enrolled in the Art Students League, where she paid for her dramatic training by working in a dress shop. She made her Broadway debut in 1923 in the stage production of "The Wild Wescotts". It was during this event that she adopted the name Claudette Colbert. One of the brightest film stars to grace the screen was born Emilie Claudette Chauchoin on September 13, 1903, in Saint Mandé, France where her father owned a bakery at 57, rue de la République (now Avenue Général de Gaulle). The family moved to the United States when she was three years old. She began acting in high school and in 1923 appeared on the Broadway stage in a small part. Hooked, she gave up on her plans to be a fashion designer to instead pursue a career in acting. She made her first motion picture appearance in 1927, in For the Love of Mike, a silent movie shot on location in Paramount Studios in New York, New York facilities. However, talking movies were taking over and two years later, Colbert appeared in her first talking movie, The Hole in the Wall, co-starring another newcomer, Edward G. Robinson. Her final appearance before the cameras was in a TV movie, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987). She did, however, remain on the stage where she had returned in 1956, her first love. After a series of strokes, Claudette divided her time between New York and Barbados. On July 30, 1996, Claudette died in Speightstown,Barbados. She was 92 years old.

Career 

In 1930 Colbert signed a contract with Paramount Pictures, who were looking for stage actors who could handle dialog in the new "talkies" medium. Colbert's elegant, musical voice was one of her best assets. Some of her early hit movies were Manslaughter (1930) and Honor Among Lovers (1931), both with Fredric March, The Smiling Lieutenant (1931), with Maurice Chevalier and Miriam Hopkins, and  Torch Singer (1933), with Ricardo Cortez and David Manners.

Colbert's career got a huge boost when Cecil B. DeMille cast her as the Roman empress Poppaea in his historical epic The Sign of the Cross (1932), opposite Fredric March and Charles Laughton (as Nero). In one of the most memorable scenes in movie history, Claudette bathes nude in a marble pool filled with asses' milk.

She worked again for DeMille and was dazzling as his  Cleopatra (1934), opposite Warren William and Henry Wilcoxon. In 1934 she won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role opposite Clark Gable in the Frank Capra classic screwball comedy It Happened One Night, a movie she initially described as the "worst picture in the world". Her performance, however, proved to Hollywood that she was an expert comedienne. She initially balked at pulling up her skirt to entice a passing car to give her and Gable a ride in one famous scene, complaining that it was unladylike. However, upon seeing the chorus girl who was brought in as her body double, an outraged Colbert told the director, "Get her out of here. I'll do it. That's not my leg!" Colbert then starred in the original Imitation of Life (1934), opposite Warren William and Louise Beavers.

Claudette spent the rest of the 1930s deftly alternating between romantic comedies and dramas, and found success in both: Private Worlds (1935), with Charles Boyer; She Married Her Boss (1935), with Melvyn Douglas; The Gilded Lily (1935) and The Bride Comes Home (1935), both with Fred MacMurray; Under Two Flags (1936), with Ronald Colman; Tovarich (1937), again with Boyer; Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), with Gary Cooper; Zaza (1939), with Herbert Marshall; Midnight (1939), with Don Ameche; It's a Wonderful World (1939), with James Stewart; and Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), with Henry Fonda.

In addition to Capra and DeMille, Colbert was working with the top directors in the industry: Dorothy Arzner, Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, Frank Lloyd, John M. Stahl, Wesley Ruggles, Gregory La Cava, Anatole Litvak, George Cukor, Mitchell Leisen, and John Ford.

Colbert believed that her face was difficult to light and photograph, and was obsessed with not showing her "bad" side, the right, to the camera, because of a small bump that resulted from a childhood broken nose.

From 1936 to 1944, she starred in numerous programs of Cecil B. DeMille's Lux Radio Theater, which was one of the most popular dramatic radio shows at the time. In 1952, she returned to work in her native France where she stayed until 1955.

Apart from making two more Hollywood movies, she went back to Broadway in 1958 doing "The Marriage Go-Round" with Charles Boyer, earning a 1959 Tony Award nomination for her work. Also for her Chicago theatre work, in 1980 she won the Sarah Siddons Award. In 1984 she appeared with Rex Harrison in Frederick Lonsdale's "Aren't We All" at the Haymarket Theatre, London, and also the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Broadway, presented by Douglas Urbanski.   Ms. Colbert's last movie was Parrish in 1961. She acted in numerous Broadway plays for the next twenty years. In 1987, she did a television mini-series titled The Two Mrs. Grenvilles and was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Mini-series or a Special. In 1988, she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture made for TV.  In 1989 she received the Kennedy Center Honors.

During her career, Claudette Colbert played in sixty-five movies. For her contribution to the motion picture industry, she was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Personal life 

Colbert married twice. Her first husband was Norman Foster, an actor and later a director, whom she married in 1928 and divorced in Mexico in 1935. According to the account of the divorce in the New York Times, published on August 31, 1935, "Some secrecy surrounded the proceedings, for while Mr. Feldman [Colbert's agent] apparently was at liberty to tell of the divorce being granted, he said he could not tell where in Mexico it was obtained." The report further stated that "The Fosters created something of a sensation when they disclosed that they were trying to remain happily married while living in separate homes. But even this experiment apparently failed." Four months after her divorce, on December 24, 1935, Colbert married Dr. Joel J. Pressman, a throat specialist, who died in 1968; her former husband went on to marry the actress Sally Blane, a sister of Loretta Young.

When she retired from motion pictures, Colbert and her husband moved to Palm Springs where she operated a store for a time before moving to Barbados. The idea of moving to Barbados came to her following a visit to Noël Coward's house in Jamaica. At her home there, called Bellerive, she spent her later years as a hostess to the world's powerful and famous. Ronald Reagan was one of her guests during his presidency, as were Lillian Helman, Kirk Douglas, Jack Benny, Rex Harrison, and Slim Keith. She had a small guest house built on the property for the honeymoon of Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow.

Colbert died at her home in Barbados, following series of small strokes during the last two years of her life at the age of 92, and she was interred there in the Parish of St. Peter Cemetery along with her mother and husband. A requiem mass was held at St. Vincent Ferrer church in New York City later.

According to an article published in August 10, 1996 issue of the Cincinnati Post, the childless Colbert left most of her estate, estimated at $3.5 million and including her Manhattan apartment and her home in Barbados, to a friend, Helen O'Hagan, a retired director of corporate relations at Saks Fifth Avenue, whom Colbert had met in 1961 on the set of Parrish, the actress's last movie. Bellerive was later bought by David Geffen.

After Colbert's death, rumors about the actress's purported lesbian relationships, including supposed affairs with Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, began to circulate in the international media. In response, Colbert's friend Helen O'Hagan told the New York Daily News that the actress barely knew Dietrich or Garbo and that Colbert was "a man's lady". The purported Colbert-Dietrich relationship also was explored in the 2001 book Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 by William J. Mann, a movie historian.

Filmography 

 For the Love of Mike (1927)
 The Hole in the Wall (1929)
 The Lady Lies (1929)
 Young Man of Manhattan (1930)
 The Big Pond (1930) (a French version was also filmed with the same cast)
 Manslaughter (1930)
 Mysterious Mr. Parkes (1930) (French version of the 1930 movie Slightly Scarlet)
 Honor Among Lovers (1931)
 The Smiling Lieutenant (1931)
 Secrets of a Secretary (1931)
 His Woman (1931)
 Hollywood on Parade (1932) (short subject)
 The Wiser Sex (1932)
 Misleading Lady (193)
 The Man from Yesterday (1932)
 Make Me a Star (1932) (Cameo)
 The Phantom President (1932)
 The Sign of the Cross (1932)
 Tonight Is Ours (1933)
 Hollywood on Parade No. 9 (1933) (short subject)
 I Cover the Waterfront (1933)
 Three-Cornered Moon (1933)
 Torch Singer (1933)
 The Hollywood You Never See (1934) (short subject)
 Four Frightened People (1934)
 It Happened One Night (1934)
 Cleopatra (1934)
 Imitation of Life (1934)
 The Fashion Side of Hollywood (1935) (short subject)
 The Gilded Lily (1935)
 Private Worlds (1935)
 She Married Her Boss (1935)
 The Bride Comes Home (1935)
 Under Two Flags (1936)
 Maid of Salem (1937)
 I Met Him in Paris (1937)

 Tovarich (1937)
 Breakdowns of 1938 (1938) (short subject)
 Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938)
 Hollywood Goes to Town (1938) (short subject)
 Zaza (1939)
 Midnight (1939)
 It's a Wonderful World (1939)
 Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)
 Boom Town (1940)
 Arise, My Love (1940)
 Skylark (1941)
 Remember the Day (1941)
 Hedda Hopper's Hollywood No. 6 (1942) (short subject)
 The Palm Beach Story (1942)
 No Time for Love (1943)
 So Proudly We Hail! (1943)
 Since You Went Away (1944)
 Practically Yours (1944)
 Guest Wife (1945)
 Tomorrow Is Forever (1946)
 Without Reservations (1946)
 The Secret Heart (1946)
 The Egg and I (1947)
 Sleep, My Love (1948)
 Family Honeymoon (1949)
 Bride for Sale (1949)
 Three Came Home (1950)
 The Secret Fury (1950)
 Thunder on the Hill (1951)
 Let's Make It Legal (1951)
 The Planter's Wife (1952)
 Daughters of Destiny (1954)
 Royal Affairs in Versailles (1954)
 Texas Lady (1955)
 Parrish (1961)

Radio 
 Burns and Allen (04-13-1943 Guest)

Television 
 The Jack Benny Program (1951, 1 episode)
 General Electric Theater (1954-1955, 2 episodes)
 The Best of Broadway (1954, 1 episode)
 Climax! (1954-1955, 3 episodes )
 The Ford Television Theatre (1955, 2 episodes)
 Letter to Loretta (1955, 1 episode)
 Ford Star Jubilee (1956, 1 episode)
 Robert Montgomery Presents (1956, 1 episode)
 The Steve Allen Show (3 episodes, 1956-1958)
 What's My Line? (2 episodes, 1956-1959)
 Playhouse 90 (1957, 1 episode)
 Zane Grey Theater (1957-1960, 2 episodes)
 General Motors 50th Anniversary Show (1957)
 Telephone Time (1957, 1 episode)
 Suspicion (1958, 1 episode)
 Colgate Theatre (1958, 1 episode)
 The Bells of St. Mary's (1959)
 The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987)

Broadway 
 The Wild Westcotts (1923-1924)
 A Kiss in a Taxi (1925)
 The Ghost Train (1926)
 The Pearl of Great Price (1926)
 The Barker (1927)
 The Mulberry Bush (1927)
 La Gringa (1928)
 Within the Law (1928)
 Fast Life (1928)
 Tin Pan Alley (1928)
 Dynamo (1929)
 See Naples and Die (1929)
 Janus (1956)
 The Marriage-Go-Round (1958-1960)
 Julia, Jake and Uncle Joe (1961)
 The Irregular Verb to Love (1963)
 The Kingfisher (1978-1979)
 A Talent for Murder (1981)
 Aren't We All? (1985)

References 

 "Colbert Wealth Left to Neighbor", The Cincinnati Post, August 10, 1996

Bibliography 
 Claudette Colbert (1976), William K. Everson
 Claudette Colbert : An Illustrated Biography (1985), Lawrence J. Quirk

Other websites 

 Find-A-Grave profile for Claudette Colbert

Academy Award winning actors
Actors from New York City
Actors from Paris
American movie actors
American stage actors
American television actors
Deaths from stroke
Golden Globe Award winners
1903 births
1996 deaths