page_title: Carroll Baker
section_title: 1967–1975: European films
hierarchical_section_title: Carroll Baker / Career / 1967–1975: European films
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Screenshot dal trailer del film Il dolce corpo di Deborah (1968) di Romolo Guerrieri
context_page_description: Carroll Baker is a retired American actress of film, stage, and television. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Baker's range of roles from young ingénues to brash and flamboyant women established her as both a pin-up and serious dramatic actress. After studying under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, Baker began performing on Broadway in 1954. From there she was recruited by director Elia Kazan to play the lead in the adaptation of two Tennessee Williams plays into the film Baby Doll in 1956. Her role in the film as a coquettish but sexually naïve Southern bride earned her BAFTA and Oscar nominations for Best Actress, as well as a Golden Globe award for Most Promising Newcomer that year.
  Her other early film roles included George Stevens' Giant, playing the love interest of James Dean, and in the romantic comedy But Not for Me. In 1961, Baker appeared in the controversial independent film Something Wild, directed by her then-husband Jack Garfein, playing a traumatized rape victim. She went on to star in several critically acclaimed Westerns in the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Big Country, How the West Was Won, and Cheyenne Autumn.
context_section_description: Baker separated from her second husband, Jack Garfein, in 1967, and moved to Europe with her two children to pursue a career there after struggling to find work in Hollywood. Eventually settling in Rome, Baker became fluent in Italian and spent the next several years starring in hard-edged Italian thrillers, exploitation, and horror films. In 1966, Baker had been invited to the Venice International Film Festival, where she met director Marco Ferreri, who asked her to play the lead role in Her Harem (1967). This was followed with the horror films The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968) and The Devil Has Seven Faces (1971). Baker also starred in So Sweet... So Perverse (1969), Orgasmo (1969), A Quiet Place to Kill (1970), and Il coltello di ghiaccio (Knife of Ice) (1972), all giallo films directed by Italian filmmaker Umberto Lenzi.
  Many of these films feature her in roles as distressed women, and often showed Baker in nude scenes, which few major Hollywood actors were willing to do at the time. Baker became a favorite of Umberto Lenzi, with her best-known role being in the aforementioned Paranoia, where she played a wealthy widow tormented by two sadistic siblings. In his review of Paranoia, Roger Ebert said: "Carroll Baker, who was a Hollywood sex symbol (for some, it is said) until she sued Joe Levine and got blacklisted, has been around. She may not be an actress, but she can act. In The Carpetbaggers, there was a nice wholesome vulgarity to her performance. She is not intrinsically as bad as she appears in Paranoia. I think maybe she was saying 'the hell with it', and having a good time." As with Paranoia, the majority of the films she made in Italy received poor critical reception in the United States, though they afforded Baker—who had left Hollywood in debt and with two children to support— an income, as well as fame abroad. In retrospect, Baker commented on her career in Italy and on her exploitation film roles, saying: "I think I made more films [there] than I made in Hollywood, but the mentality is different. What they think is wonderful is not what we might ... it was marvelous for me because it really brought me back to life, and it gave me a whole new outlook. It's wonderful to know about a different world."
  She followed her roles in Lenzi's films with a leading role in Corrado Farina's  Baba Yaga (1973) as the titular witch, alongside Isabelle De Funès and George Eastman. TV Guide referred to the film as an "exceptionally handsome example of 1970s Italian pop-exploitation filmmaking sweetened by Piero Umilani's lounge-jazz score", and praised Baker's performance, but noted that she was "physically wrong for the role; her elaborate lace-and-beribboned costumes sometimes make her look more like a fleshy Miss Havisham than a sleekly predatory sorceress".
caption: Baker as the titular tormented bride in The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968)
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