Claudette Colbert

Claudette Colbert: The Reluctant Queen of Screwball

Claudette Colbert did not want to make "It Happened One Night." She agreed only after Columbia guaranteed she could finish the shoot in four weeks flat for $50,000, cash she wanted to spend on a ski vacation. The film she nearly skipped won her the Academy Award, reshaped what a movie star could be, and became one of the defining comedies of the twentieth century — proof that some careers are made by the projects an actress tries hardest to avoid.

A Parisian Childhood, Relocated

She was born Émilie "Lily" Claudette Chauchoin on September 13, 1903, in Saint-Mandé, France, the daughter of a father who managed a chain of pastry shops and a mother of British Channel Islands descent. In 1906 the family immigrated to Manhattan, settling into a fifth-floor walk-up on 53rd Street while her father took a job in a bank's foreign department. Colbert grew up bilingual, attended the arts-focused Washington Irving High School, and studied at the Art Students League while working in a dress shop, with an early ambition toward fashion design rather than acting.

From Dress Shop to Broadway

A speech teacher, noticing something in her voice, pushed her to audition for a play; she made her stage debut at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1921 and took the professional name Claudette Colbert, borrowing "Colbert" from her paternal grandmother. Between 1925 and 1929 she appeared in eleven Broadway productions, building a reputation in comedies including "A Kiss in a Taxi" and "The Barker." Paramount signed her to a film contract in 1928; she disliked the process at first, but her precise diction and elegant bearing translated onto sound film exactly when the industry needed actors who could actually be heard.

An Improbable Range

Colbert's range in the early 1930s was unusual even by the standards of the studio system. In Cecil B. DeMille's "The Sign of the Cross" (1932) she played the empress Poppaea in a scene — bathing in a marble pool of asses' milk — that became one of the most reproduced images of pre-Code Hollywood. Two years later she played the title role in DeMille's "Cleopatra," a film that finished as the second-highest grosser of 1934. That same year, in an unmatched feat for any actress before or since, she appeared in three separate films nominated for Best Picture. One of them was "It Happened One Night."

The Reluctant Masterpiece

Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night" (1934) paired Colbert with Clark Gable as a runaway heiress and a wisecracking reporter thrown together on a bus trip, and it swept the major Academy Awards — Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, and Screenplay — a clean sweep no film would repeat for decades. Colbert had taken the role reluctantly, viewing it as a minor programmer rather than prestige work, and reportedly told a friend on her way to collect the Oscar that she hadn't expected to win. The film effectively invented the screwball comedy genre as Hollywood would practice it for the rest of the decade, and it made Colbert, almost against her own expectations, one of the industry's most bankable stars.

A Decade at the Top

By 1936 Colbert had renegotiated into one of Hollywood's richest contracts, and by 1938 she was reportedly the highest-paid actress in the industry, earning over $426,000 that year. Between 1934 and 1939 she made seventeen films, more than 2.5 a year, moving fluidly between screwball comedy — "Midnight" (1939), scripted by Billy Wilder — and heavier drama. Preston Sturges's "The Palm Beach Story" (1942) is often cited as one of her sharpest performances, and David O. Selznick's wartime drama "Since You Went Away" (1944), in which she played a mother holding a family together on the home front, became the year's third-highest grossing film and brought her a further Oscar nomination. A friend later described her screen presence bluntly: she "always looked as if everything was so easy for her" while, in fact, deploying "enormous technique" that audiences were never meant to notice.

A Career That Outran Its Genre

Colbert was known off-screen for a controlling perfectionism about her own image — she insisted on being shot from her left profile only, after a childhood injury to her nose, a preference crews accommodated for decades. She frequently paired with Fred MacMurray, appearing in seven films together, and with Fredric March in four. But the industry that had made her a star on youthful comic energy struggled to place her as she aged: a serious back injury around 1950 cost her the lead in "All About Eve," a role that instead went to Bette Davis and became one of the more famous might-have-beens in Hollywood casting. Colbert herself later reflected on the mismatch with some rue: "I just never had the luck to play bitches" — the dramatic, morally compromised roles that sustained other actresses' later careers.

A Second Act on Stage and Screen

Rather than fade, Colbert shifted into television and theater from the mid-1950s onward, earning a Tony nomination for "The Marriage-Go-Round" in 1959 and the Sarah Siddons Award for her Chicago stage work in 1980. Her final major screen role came decades after her film peak, in the 1987 television miniseries "The Two Mrs. Grenvilles," which won her a Golden Globe and an Emmy nomination — a coda that proved her technique had outlasted the studio system that made her famous. In 1989 she received the Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime achievement.

Why Claudette Is Called a Genius

Calling Colbert a genius requires some care, because her gift was not conceptual or inventive in the way the word usually implies — she did not create a new form the way a director or composer might. What she had was an unusually complete command of screen comic technique: timing, vocal modulation, and physical control precise enough that contemporaries described her work as effortless, when in fact it was the opposite. That is a genius of craft rather than of ideas — closer to the skill of a master instrumentalist executing a difficult passage so cleanly that the difficulty disappears. The three-Best-Picture-nomination year of 1934 is the best hard evidence of unusual range: a screwball heroine, an empress, and a runaway socialite, all convincing, all in the same twelve months. The honest counter-case is that Colbert worked within a genre — sophisticated comedy — that the industry itself did not always rank as seriously as tragic or dramatic performance, which is part of why her later, harder dramatic roles proved elusive and why she never wholly escaped the shadow of the one film she'd tried to avoid making.

Legacy

Colbert spent her later years dividing time between Manhattan and a plantation house in Barbados, entertaining a wide circle that included Nancy and Ronald Reagan, Frank Sinatra, and Kirk Douglas, until a series of small strokes preceded her death on July 30, 1996, at ninety-two. The American Film Institute later ranked her the twelfth-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema. Her Barbados home sold to David Geffen after her death; her far more durable legacy is a film she almost didn't make, still shown as the founding text of American romantic comedy.

Achievements

• Academy Award for Best Actress — 1935
• Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Series, Miniseries or Television Film — 1988
• Educated at Art Students League of New York and Washington Irving High School
• Worked as film actor, stage actor and television actor