Claudette Colbert

Claudette Colbert, born Émilie Claudette Chauchoin on September 13, 1903, in Saint-Mandé, France, was an actress whose career spanned Broadway, film, and television across more than six decades. She died on July 30, 1996. Her family, which included her parents Jeanne and Georges Chauchoin, her grandmother Marie Loew, and her aunt Emily Loew, relocated from France to Manhattan in 1906, settling in a fifth-floor walk-up on 53rd Street. The family was naturalized as American citizens in 1912. Growing up bilingual in English and French, Colbert attended Washington Irving High School, where speech teacher Alice Rostetter encouraged her toward performance. She had initially pursued painting and fashion design, attending the Art Students League of New York and working in a dress shop to fund her studies.

Her stage debut came in 1921 at the Provincetown Playhouse, where she appeared in revivals of Rostetter's The Widow's Veil and Edna St. Vincent Millay's Aria da Capo. She adopted the stage name Claudette Colbert — using the given name she had gone by since high school and adding her paternal grandmother's maiden name — when she made her Broadway debut in a small role in The Wild Westcotts in 1923. After signing a five-year contract with producer Al Woods, she played ingenue roles on Broadway from 1925 to 1929. Her Broadway credits during this period included A Kiss in a Taxi, which ran for 103 performances, and The Barker in 1927, in which she played a carnival snake charmer, a role she later reprised in London's West End. Her Broadway career, which extended from 1923 to 1985, also included the plays Aren't We All? and A Talent for Murder, among other productions.

In 1928, Colbert signed a contract with Paramount Pictures, where her elegance, musical voice, and facility with dialogue made her well suited to the emerging era of sound films. She appeared opposite Maurice Chevalier in The Big Pond in 1930 and co-starred with Fredric March across four films between 1930 and 1933, including Manslaughter and Honor Among Lovers. She appeared in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross in 1932 alongside March and Charles Laughton, and later starred in DeMille's Cleopatra in 1934. That same year she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in It Happened One Night. She received two additional Academy Award nominations over the course of her career. Among her most frequently cited films are The Palm Beach Story in 1942 and Since You Went Away in 1944. Fred MacMurray appeared alongside her in seven films between 1935 and 1949. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Colbert the 12th-greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema, and she acted in more than 60 films in total.

By the mid-1950s, Colbert had shifted her focus from motion pictures to stage and television work. She received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actress in a Play in 1959 for The Marriage-Go-Round. In the late 1970s she returned to the theater, and her work on the Chicago stage earned her a Sarah Siddons Award in 1980. Her television film The Two Mrs. Grenvilles in 1987 brought her a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award nomination. Her father had died in 1925, and her grandmother passed away in New York in the mid-1930s at the age of 88. Colbert was originally from Paris, France, and her Broadway appearances spanned more than sixty years, from 1923 through 1985.