It was pure box office gold. Her beauty, her high cheekbones, her cute bangs, her gift for comedy (and also for melodrama) made Claudette Colbert (1903-1996) the highest paid actress of the days of golden Hollywood . Colbert made audiences laugh in must-see movies like It Happened One Night, Midnight, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife, and The Palm Beach Story. Colbert made the audience cry with unforgettable dramas like Imitation of life or Tomorrow is living. And she Colbert was always loved by the directors and co-stars for her seriousness in her work, because unlike other stars of the time, she did not have a dissipated life nor was she the meat of a scandal.
She was born in France, although she moved with her family to the United States as a child. She wanted to dedicate herself to singing, but a throat condition made her give up that idea. And as often happens with many of the stars of the time, she came to the cinema by chance. An acquaintance of hers offered her a role on Broadway and she went on stage. The beginnings of it were not easy. Critics destroyed her at her premiere as the lead, but Colbert did not give up, she studied and improved until she became a good actress who caught the attention of Hollywood producers.
His first film was a flop, but his second, The Lady Lies (Hobart Henley, 1929), was a success and made Colbert a big star. So Cecil B. DeMille did not hesitate to sign her to play Poppaea in The Sign of the Cross (1932), a film about Romans that fell in love with the public of the time. As things went well, Colbert repeated under the baton of the legendary director in Cleopatra (1934), a film that told the romances of the queen of Egypt with Julius Caesar first and with Marco Antonio later. Neither of the two films are a history class but they served for the actress to show her eroticism dressed in her period and for Hollywood to exploit her kitsch vein and her fantastic papier-mâché decorations.
But Colbert did not allow himself to be pigeonholed, he went from period cinema to high comedy and managed to reach the top again a bit by chance. Frank Capra was looking for protagonists for It Happened One Night, but the project did not quite seduce anyone. Clark Gable agreed to participate in the film while drunk. Myrna Loy, Margaret Sullavan, Miriam Hopkins and Constance Bennett turned down the lead female role. So Capra only had Colbert left and he went to the actress's house to try to convince her knowing that "in general the French like money."
"The Frenchie was in a French frenzy. She said it was all a mistake, she hadn't made an appointment, she was packing because she was leaving for Sun Valley in half an hour, please excuse me." I could see from these words that she was perfect for the role of the rich heiress: spoiled, spoiled, charming. I couldn't lose her," Capra recalls in her autobiography, The Name Before the Title. She did not lose it because she doubled her salary and promised that the shooting would not last a minute longer than the four weeks planned. This is how the actress embarked on one of the most famous films in history. The shoot was pure fun: "Colbert chafed, protested and argued about his role; he challenged my reckless way of shooting scenes; he kept going on about his date in Sun Valley. He was a bug, but adorable" .
Capra also recalls the moment in which one of the most famous sequences in movie history was filmed: "In the well-known hitchhiking scene in which he proves that his leg is much better than Gable's thumb, he refused to put on the dress and show the leg. We waited until the casting director sent us a chorus girl who did a magnificent double for Colbert. When he saw his double's leg, Colbert said, "Get her out of here. I will do it. That's not my leg!" And of course it wasn't. There are no more exquisite legs than Colbert's…not even Marlene's."
It Happened One Night tells the story of Ellie, a wealthy heiress who wants to marry a gold digger. The girl's father objects and she runs away to meet her boyfriend. She gets on a bus and there she meets an unemployed journalist, Peter, who recognizes her. She promises him a story if he doesn't rat her out. During the trip, the relationship between the two strangers grows closer. The film was an incredible success and took home five Oscars including Colbert's for best actress. She also served to underpin a very popular type of female character in the 1930s, that of an independent woman who does not submit to the orders of her father or her husband. Colbert would become a specialist in bringing these types of girls to life.
Thus, in Imitation of Life (John M. Stahl, 1934), Colbert is Beatrice, a widow with a daughter who welcomes Delilah (Louise Beavers) a black employee into her home, who is also the mother of a girl. They are strapped for money, but Beatrice comes up with the idea of marketing Delilah's delicious pancakes and they become millionaires. Then the girls grow up and cause trouble. Beatrice's daughter falls in love with her stepfather and Delilah's stepfather pretends to be white to avoid the racism of the time. The film was a huge success and was remade in 1959 directed by Douglas Sirk and starring Lana Turner.
After showing that he also knew how to make the public cry, Colbert's cache went up and up. His private life was an example of discretion and knowing how to be. She married Norman Foster, a film director, in 1928, but the couple did not live together and separated in 1935. In 1936, she married a famous doctor, Joel Pressman, whom she was married to until his death in 1968. No He had children. In March 1936, La Vanguardia published a long interview with the star, "the most perfect example of the vivacious and charming beauty of the French woman."
Claudette explained in that interview that her beauty secret consisted of "the daily use of pure soap and clear water for cleaning and good walks in the open air for exercise." "He eats frugally, for breakfast he usually has a cup of coffee and toast, preceded by a glass of orange juice. At noon, a bowl of soup and a salad, and at night, he is allowed to eat a little meat ". "The actress lives in her new colonial-style house with her husband and her mother, and there she can devote herself to tennis, her favorite sport," the report added.
Despite the success of Imitation of Life, Colbert confessed that his favorite genre was "comedy as long as it has a fine, satirical cut, brimming with irresistible humor" as is the case of The Eighth Woman of Bluebeard (1938), a work film master signed by Ernst Lubitsch. Colbert is Nicole, the daughter of a bankrupt French aristocrat, who meets Michael (Gary Cooper) in a department store on the Côte d'Azur. They both want to buy pajamas, but he only wants her bottoms and she only wants the top. As is logical, after that coincidence they fall in love, but when they are going to get married, Nicole discovers that it is far from the first love of her handsome husband who already has seven marriages behind him, so she hatches a plan to punish the womanizer Michael.
And although it is less known, it is almost or even more delicious Midnight, directed by Mitchell Leisen in 1939 with a script by Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder. In this case, Claudette is Eve, an American who arrives in Paris in a third class carriage from the Monte Carlo casino, where she has spent everything. She only has a wonderful evening dress left, which she wears from her, her beauty and her great intelligence. It doesn't take long for her to integrate into Parisian high society determined to find a millionaire husband who will lift her out of impoverished poverty, but a penniless taxi driver (Don Ameche) gets in the way of her plans.
The actress maintained her stardom in the 40s and made films where she shone with that character of an independent and liberated woman who knows how to maintain herself (although inevitably she always finds love). In Arise, My Love (Mitchell Leisen, 1940), Colbert is a journalist who saves Tom's (Ray Milland) life during the Spanish Civil War. The film was not released at the time in Spain because Milland's character had fought on the Republican side. And in No Time to Love (Mitchell Leisen, 1943), the actress played a famous photographer dedicated exclusively to work who ended up falling in love with a subway worker played by Fred MacMurray.
"You don't know how you can succeed with beautiful legs," Colbert told Joel McCrea in The Palm Beach Story (A rich husband), a 1942 film directed by Preston Sturges, which today is considered a classic and is perhaps the last screwball of golden Hollywood. "Colbert is Gerry, a witty, intelligent, and cynicistic woman who, even in love with her husband, Tom (Joel McCrea), coldly reasons that their happiness lies in her marrying a millionaire," she relates. Ángel Comas in The Essentials by Preston Sturges. With such a start there is no doubt that the craziest comedy is served.
Colbert remained active throughout the 1950s, but avoided stretching her career into horror films or disaster movies like other stars of the day and retired from film in 1961 with a mother role in Parrish (Delmer Daves), a melodrama to show off Troy Donahue, one of the leading men of the moment now forgotten. Despite having moved away from the big screen, the actress made some public appearances in her maturity. In 1990 she went to the San Sebastian Festival to collect the Donostia Award. Claudette Colbert died in 1996 in Speightstown (Barbados). She was 96 years old. Movie lovers haven't forgotten her high cheekbones, her cute bangs, and her flair for comedy (and melodrama, too).
