(b. 3 September 1903 in Paris, France; d. 30 July 1996 in Barbados, West Indies), actor of stage, screen, television, and radio who won the Academy Award for best actress for the comedy classic It Happened One Night.
Colbert was born Lily Claudette Chauchoin. When the financial situation in France adversely affected her father, Georges Chauchoin, a banker, he and his wife, Jeanne Loew Chauchoin, brought Colbert and her brother to New York City in 1912. Colbert attended Public School #15 and graduated from Washington Irving High School in 1923. Her first high school role was Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. After graduation, Colbert attended the Art Students League, gave French lessons, and worked in dress shops, aspiring to a career in fashion design.
Colbert made her first Broadway appearance in 1923 in a small role as Sybil Blake in Anne Morrison’s The Wild Westcotts. One story about this role says that Colbert so impressed Morrison at a social function that the playwright inserted a few lines for Colbert to speak, and that during the pre-Broadway run the director felt compelled to enhance her role. In any event, the bubbly five-foot-four, hazel-eyed Colbert resolved to become an actress. She adopted “Claudette Colbert” as her stage name—“Colbert” being her paternal grandmother’s maiden name.
She performed in almost a dozen plays between 1924 and 1926 in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. Although Colbert never took any formal acting lessons, she educated herself in acting techniques by observing well-established actors as she stood in the wings during performances. Al Woods, producer at New York’s Eltinge Theatre, gave her a five-year contract, which began in the 1925–1926 season. Greater financial responsibilities intensified her drive toward a successful acting career when her father died in 1926. When Colbert starred in Kenyon Nicholson’s melodrama The Barker in 1927, she impressed audiences and critics with the development of her character, Lou, the seductive snake charmer. The play became the vehicle for her London debut on 7 May 1928. She performed in several other Broadway plays from the fall of 1928 through 1929, including Eugene O’Neill’s Dynamo and Elmer Rice’s See Naples and Die, her final Broadway appearance until 1955.
Colbert secretly married Norman Foster, her costar in The Barker, on 13 March 1928 in London. The couple preferred to live apart for much of the first year of their marriage and, even when the press disclosed the marriage, they generally lived at separate addresses in California. A Mexican divorce dissolved the marriage in August 1935. On 24 December 1935, in Yuma, Arizona, Colbert married Dr. Joel J. Pressman, who had been her overseeing physician during some of her (lifelong) sinus problems. Pressman died of liver cancer on 26 February 1968. Colbert had no children.
Colbert’s first and only silent film, which was directed by Frank Capra, was For the Love of Mike, which she filmed in 1927 while still starring in The Barker. The film demanded so much studio time that Colbert could barely make her first entrance in the play. Colbert was so displeased with the entire experience and the resulting film that she resolved never to act on the screen again. Yet within two years, perhaps in part due to the effect the Great Depression had on the finances of Broadway, she agreed to a fourteen-year contract (1930–1944) with Paramount. Colbert worked through 1931 at the Paramount studios in the borough of Queens in New York City before moving to Hollywood with her mother and brother. In 1929 she starred with Edward G. Robinson in her first talking picture, The Hole in the Wall. Colbert’s early films were melodramas or sophisticated comedies. She appeared with Walter Huston in The Lady Lies (1929), joined Foster in Young Man of Manhattan (1930), and acted with her French compatriots Maurice Chevalier (The Big Pond, 1930; The Smiling Lieutenant, 1931) and Charles Boyer (The Manfrom Yesterday, 1932; Private Worlds, 1935; and Tovarich, 1937).
During her peak years, some of Colbert’s costars included Fredric March, Herbert Marshall, Melvyn Douglas, John Barrymore, Ray Milland, Robert Young, Ronald Colman, David Niven, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, and Spencer Tracy. The motion picture high points of these years were Ernst Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant; two films directed by Cecil B. DeMille, The Sign of the Cross (1932) and Cleopatra (1934); Mitchell Leisen’s outstanding comedy, Midnight (1939); Colbert’s first Technicolor film, John Ford’s Drums Along the Mohawk (1939); and Preston Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story (1942).
The pinnacle of Colbert’s motion-picture career was Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934). She was not overly impressed with the script, and at the time was preparing for a ski trip to Sun Valley, Idaho. Unable to secure his first choice for the role, Capra coaxed Colbert into accepting the lead by promising to double her current salary at Paramount ($25,000 per film) and to squeeze the filming into several weeks to finish in time for Christmas. Colbert won the 1935 Academy Award for best actress for her role in the film. It was so unusual for a comedy to win a top Academy Award that Colbert, attired in a traveling suit and ready to board a train, had to be rushed by studio personnel to the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel, where she proudly accepted her award. Her two subsequent Academy Award nominations were for Private Worlds (1935), about the staff in a mental institution, and Since You Went Away (1944), a home-front World War II drama, in which she played the mother of Jennifer Jones and Shirley Temple. Colbert’s final film with Paramount was Practically Yours (1944) with Fred MacMurray. During her years with Paramount, Colbert made more than forty films.
In the late 1930s and 1940s Colbert engaged in occasional radio work for DeMille’s Lux Radio Theatre on CBS: Hands Across the Sea and The Awful Truth. During her freelancing period from the mid-1940s through 1961, Colbert worked with at least six American studios, as well as studios in England and France. She made two more films at United Artists with Don Ameche, a comedy, Guest Wife (1945), and a thriller, Sleep, My Love (1948); her last two of seven films with MacMurray at Universal, The Egg and I (1947) and Family Honeymoon (1948); some unusual war-related films at RKO-International, Tomorrow Is Forever (1946) with Orson Welles and George Brent; and at Twentieth Century-Fox, Three Came Home (1950) with Sessue Hayakawa. Colbert made her last comedy in 1951 (Let’s Make It Legal, Twentieth Century-Fox) and her final film in 1961 (Parrish, Warner Brothers).
During the early 1950s Colbert continued performances on Lux Radio Theatre and appeared in the theater and the new medium of television. She returned to Broadway in 1956 to replace Margaret Sullavan in Janus. On 29 October 1958 Colbert opened in the first of over 450 performances of The Marriage-Go-Round, a comedy with Boyer for which she received a nomination for the Tony Award for best actress.
Colbert made her first television appearance in April 1951 on CBS’s The jack Benny Show and the first of her many dramatic television roles in September 1954 in The Royal Family for CBS’s The Best of Broadway. Among her numerous television appearances were Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1956), General Motors Fiftieth Anniversary Show (1957), and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1959). In 1987, almost thirty years after The Bells of St. Mary’s, Colbert appeared with Ann-Margaret in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles on NBC, for which she was nominated for an Emmy (1987) and awarded a Golden Globe (1988). At the 1988 American Festival in Deauville, France, Colbert was presented with the medal of the French Legion of Honor. In 1984 she was honored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and in 1989 she was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Honor from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
In the mid-1970s Colbert embarked upon a third phase of her stage career, beginning in 1974 with Community of Two in Philadelphia. For her role in The Kingfisher (1978), she won the Sarah Siddons Society Award for best actress. Her final stage performance was in Frederick Lonsdale’s Aren’t We All?, which opened in London in the summer of 1984 and subsequently toured in the United States and Australia.
In addition to property in California, two apartments in Manhattan (at 136 East Sixty-fourth Street) and an apartment in the Passy district of Paris, Colbert and her husband owned an estate in Saint Peter, Barbados, West Indies, which they named “Bellerive.” After they sold the estate in California where Colbert had lived with her mother for many years, they made Bellerive their permanent residence. Colbert enjoyed painting portraits, swimming daily in her pool, and entertaining friends. Even after a stroke in March 1993 left her confined to a wheelchair, she was still able to visit with her friends. Colbert died at the age of ninety-two; her remains were cremated and divided between New York and Barbados. Her cremated remains in Barbados are placed near her husband, who is buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery.
Claudette Colbert sparkled in the spotlight of theatrical fame, first during the late 1920s and again over fifty years later. She also reigned as one of Hollywood’s highest-salaried stars from the mid-1930s through the 1940s. Because of her professional perfectionism and earnest approach to her dramatic craft—whether on stage, screen, radio, or television—she created vibrant personalities that ranged from queens of antiquity, to seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Americans, to contemporary sophisticated ladies, to modern wartime internees, that captivated and sustained the interest of the audience. Colbert always gave an interesting screen performance, even when the rest of a film was mediocre. She excelled in screwball comedies such as It Happened One Night, and that film has become an enduring classic.
The Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center holds some clippings, photographs, and scrapbooks about Colbert’s career. Colbert never wrote an autobiography. She did give interviews to Lawrence J. Quirk for parts of Claudette Colbert: An Illustrated Biography (1985), which covers her personal and professional life on stage and screen and contains an excellent selection of photographs, a filmography, and an index. There are interviews in the New York Times, such as 24 Mar. 1935, 17 Feb. 1946, and 27 Feb. 1955. Other works focusing on Colbert are: Joseph B. Pacheco, Jr., “Claudette Colbert: Projected a Cheery Insouciance During Depression and War,” Films in Review (21 May 1970), with stills and filmography; James Robert Parish, “Claudette Colbert,” in The Paramount Pretties (1972), a discussion of her stage, screen, radio, and television credits, with some interesting quotes, a summarizing essay, a biographical section, filmography, and photographs; Parish, “Fred MacMurray-Claudette Colbert,” in Hollywood’s Great Love Teams (1974), a discussion of their films, along with film synopses and commentary; David Shipman, “Claudette Colbert,” in The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years (1979), a succinct summary of her career; and Annette Tapert, The Power of Glamour (1998), a discussion of her style, personality, sense of fashion, disciplined routine, and an insight into her lifestyle, with a collection of spectacular photographs. For extensive bibliographies see Mel Schuster, Motion Picture Performers: A Bibliography of Magazine and Periodical Articles, 1900–1969 (1971) and Supplement No. 1, 1970–1974 (1976). Obituaries are in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times (both 31 July 1996) and London Times (1 Aug. 1996). Many of Colbert’s sixty-four films are available on commercial videocassettes; the Library of Congress has a sound recording of some of The Barker.
Madeline Sapienza