Carroll Baker

Carroll Baker is a retired American actress born on May 28, 1931, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, into a Catholic family of Irish and Polish descent. Her father, William Watson Baker, worked as a traveling salesman, and her mother, Edith Gertrude, raised Carroll and her younger sister Virginia largely on her own after the parents separated when Carroll was eight. The family relocated to Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania, and later to St. Petersburg, Florida, where Baker attended St. Petersburg Junior College. She was active in school musicals and the marching band at Greensburg Salem High School in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, and went on to work as a magician's assistant on the vaudeville circuit and as a professional dancer before pursuing a formal acting career. In 1949 she won the title of Miss Florida Fruits and Vegetables, and by 1951 she had moved to New York City, working as a nightclub dancer and chorus girl while renting a basement apartment in Queens.

Baker trained at HB Studio before enrolling at the Actors Studio in 1952, where she studied under Lee Strasberg alongside classmates including Mike Nichols, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ben Gazzara, and Marilyn Monroe. She also formed a close friendship with James Dean during this period. Her professional career began with television commercials and a 1952 appearance on the DuMont Network's Monodrama Theater, followed by a small part in the 1953 musical film Easy to Love.

Her Broadway career spanned 1953 to 1962. Her first stage credit was Roger MacDougall's Escapade in the fall of 1953, followed by Robert Anderson's All Summer Long opposite Ed Begley, which ran from September to mid-November 1954. She later starred in Come on Strong. It was her performance in All Summer Long that caught the attention of director Elia Kazan, who cast her in the lead role of Baby Doll (1956), an adaptation drawing on two Tennessee Williams one-act plays. Tennessee Williams himself had specifically requested Baker for the part after watching her perform a scene from the script at the Actors Studio. The role of a sexually repressed teenaged bride brought Baker immediate fame and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

That same year, Baker appeared in Giant (1956) alongside Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, playing the supporting role of Luz Benedict II. She also appeared in the romantic comedy But Not for Me (1959) and the Western The Big Country (1958). In 1961, she starred in Something Wild, an independent film directed by her then-husband Jack Garfein, in which she played a traumatized rape victim. Her work in Westerns continued with How the West Was Won (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

In the mid-1960s, Baker became a contract player for Paramount Pictures and took on the role of a hedonistic widow in The Carpetbaggers (1964), a performance that established her as a prominent sex symbol. Producer Joseph E. Levine subsequently cast her in Sylvia and then in the title role of the biopic Harlow (1965). Despite extensive advance publicity, Harlow was a critical failure. A legal dispute with Paramount and Levine over her contract led Baker to relocate to Italy in 1966, where she spent approximately a decade working in European genre cinema. Her Italian credits included Romolo Guerrieri's The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968), four films with director Umberto Lenzi beginning with Orgasmo (1969) and concluding with Knife of Ice (1972), and Corrado Farina's Baba Yaga (1973).

Baker returned to American audiences with a role in the Andy Warhol-produced dark comedy Bad (1977) and subsequently built a career as a character actress. She appeared in the true-crime drama Star 80 (1983) as the mother of murder victim Dorothy Stratten, and in the racial drama Native Son (1986), based on Richard Wright's novel. In 1987 she had a supporting part in Ironweed. Through the 1990s she appeared in guest roles on television series including Murder, She Wrote, L.A. Law, and Roswell, as well as supporting parts in Kindergarten Cop (1990) and the David Fincher-directed thriller The Game (1997). Baker formally retired from acting in 2003. In addition to her performing career, she authored two autobiographies and two novels.