User:Britte/Sandbox

HOLLYWOOD ROUNDUP

Star Light, Star Bright

With grace, passion and tongues occasionally in cheeks, these four silver screen idols made dancing and acting onscreen look easy.

Reviewed by John DiLeo Sunday, October 5, 2008; Page BW08

CLAUDETTE COLBERT She Walked in Beauty By Bernard F. Dick | Univ. of Mississippi. 329 pp. $30

This biography subjects a scintillating actress's career to diligent film-by-film analysis. French-born and Manhattan-raised, Claudette Colbert was a star on Broadway before bringing her light touch and breezy sophistication to 1930s Hollywood. Though best remembered as one of the movies' premier comediennes in sparklers like "The Gilded Lily" and "Midnight," Colbert also scored in straight drama, notably in "Since You Went Away" and "Three Came Home," a pair of World War II-themed pictures.

Colbert showed her versatility in 1934 when she lent her tongue-in-cheek wit to the title role in Cecil B. DeMille's "Cleopatra"; contributed an Oscar-winning performance to Frank Capra's romantic comedy "It Happened One Night"; and played the lead in the tearjerker "Imitation of Life." That trifecta inspires Bernard F. Dick's most perceptive and absorbing writing, particularly the detail with which he charts each film's transition to the screen from source materials. But Dick botches his discussion of another Colbert peak, her role as the practical wife of an impractical inventor in the screwball classic "The Palm Beach Story." He painfully overanalyzes that high-spirited lark, joylessly beating out every laugh.

Whispers about Colbert's lesbianism make Dick uncomfortable, but the irony is that he inadvertently presents a believable case for it. Dick doesn't find it bizarre that Colbert and her first husband, Norman Foster, never lived together, accepting the excuse that Colbert's mother hated Foster and wouldn't have him in their home. Each fact Dick dredges up makes the marriage sound more like one of convenience. Regarding her second husband, Joel Pressman, we're told that Colbert never had the passion for him that she had for Foster (a passion that denied itself overnight stays). Pressman vanishes from the book for decades, having no discernible connection to Colbert's life; theirs is described as a relationship in which "companionship and compatibility take on greater importance than sex," even though Colbert was merely 32 when they married. Dick accuses those who would "out" Colbert of wishful thinking, but he may be guilty of that tendency himself: Colbert left most of her fortune to her longtime female companion. [1]

New Claudette Colbert bio for her birthday

Today would have been actress Claudette Colbert's 105th birthday (she lived to 92, no small achievement). This month marks the publication of a new biography, "Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty" by Bernard F. Dick. A professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Dick also has written books about Hal Wallis and Rosalind Russell.

Dick digs into Colbert's early life. Christened Emilie Chauchoin in her native France, she moved as a girl to America with her family, where she became Lily. Later she called herself Claudette Chauchoin, and eventually, as she became a stage actress, she settled on Claudette Colbert.

Colbert spent many years on the stage, and Dick chronicles her theatrical roles, from the long engagements to the truncated runs, the Broadway shows to the plays in Washington and Connecticut. He demonstrates that the theater is where Colbert got her acting chops, though the biography doesn't try to synthesize her experiences as much as describe them.

Colbert, who'd been acting in N.Y.-produced Paramount films since 1927, came to Hollywood in 1932 when the studio closed its eastern production studio. Two years later. she'd gone from hardworking actress to star; 1934 saw three of her pictures nominated for Oscars. The range is impressive: She played a vixen in "Cleopatra," the lead in the melodrama "Imitation of Life" and was a brilliant comedian in "It Happened One Night," for which she won the Best Actress Oscar. Dick dispels one of the most lasting legends about Colbert from that film:

Frank Capra seems to have originated the story that in the hitchhiking scene in "It Happened One Night," Claudette refused to lift her skirt to stop a car, preferring instead to get by on talent, not anatomy; and when she saw a shot of her stand-in's leg, she insisted that hers was better, demanding to do the scene herself and thus revealing one of the shapliest limbs in movies. In "The Smiling Lieutenant," [1931] … she removes one of her garters … the camera not only records the removal of the garter but also provides a far-from-fleeting glimpse of a leg that most women would envy. It is difficult to imagine that three years later, when Claudette was making "It Happened One Night," she could have turned so prudish. Claudette never verified Capra's version of the story; she only said that that may have been the way he remembered it, implying that it had receded into the mists of myth.

Of course, he goes on to detail her life after 1934, including her willingness to appear on television and her return to the stage. This is nothing if not an affectionate portrait of Colbert, as Dick's use of her first name indicates, as does the subtitle, taken from the Lord Byron poem. But what else does a lady deserve on her birthday?

— Carolyn Kellogg [2]