Jetta Goudal

Jetta Goudal, born Julie Henriette Goudeket on July 12, 1891, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, was a Dutch-American actress who built a career spanning European theater, Broadway, and Hollywood silent films. Her father, Wolf Mozes Goudeket, was a wealthy Orthodox Jewish diamond cutter, and her mother was Geertruida, née Warradijn. She had an older sister, Bertha, born in 1888, and a younger brother, Willem, who died at four months old in 1896. Her father later remarried in 1929, to Rosette Citroen.

Goudal began her acting career on stage, traveling through Europe with various theater companies before departing a continent ravaged by World War I. In 1918 she settled in New York City, where she concealed her Dutch Jewish background, presenting herself publicly as a Parisienne. On a Paramount publicity information sheet she listed her birthplace as Versailles and her birth year as 1901, reducing her age by a decade, and named a fictional French lawyer as her father. She made her Broadway debut in 1921 under the stage name Jetta Goudal, appearing in both The Elton Case and The Hero.

Her transition to film came after she met director Sidney Olcott, who persuaded her to pursue screen work. She took a small role in his 1922 production Timothy's Quest and subsequently appeared in two additional Olcott films over the following three years. Her first substantial motion picture credit was The Bright Shawl in 1923. Recognition grew quickly, particularly for her performance in Salome of the Tenements in 1925, an adaptation of Anzia Yezierska's novel set in New York's Jewish Lower East Side, a film now considered lost. Work in the Adolph Zukor and Jesse L. Lasky co-production The Spaniard followed, and her rising profile brought her to the attention of producer and director Cecil B. DeMille.

Goudal appeared in several commercially successful and critically praised films for DeMille and became one of Hollywood's leading box-office attractions in the late 1920s. DeMille later stated that he fired her and terminated their contract due to difficulties on set, claiming her conduct had caused repeated and costly production delays. Goudal responded by filing a breach-of-contract lawsuit against DeMille and DeMille Pictures Corporation. She prevailed in a landmark ruling after DeMille declined to submit his studio's financial records to substantiate his claims of monetary loss. In 1928 she appeared in The Cardboard Lover, a production backed by William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies. The following year she starred in Lady of the Pavements, directed by D.W. Griffith. In 1930, director Jacques Feyder cast her in Le Spectre vert, a French-language film produced in Hollywood and the only French-language production of her career.

Her willingness to sue DeMille, combined with her prominent role in the Actors' Equity Association campaign to establish a closed shop across theater and film, led several Hollywood studios to decline to hire her. In 1932, at the age of forty-one, she made her final screen appearance in Business and Pleasure, a Fox Film Corporation production in which she co-starred with Will Rogers.

Also in 1930, Goudal married Harold Grieve, an art director and founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. After her film career concluded, she and Grieve operated a successful interior design business together. They remained married until her death on January 14, 1985, in Los Angeles. She is interred beside her husband in a private room at the Great Mausoleum, Sanctuary of the Angels, at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. In 1960, Goudal received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6333 Hollywood Boulevard in recognition of her contributions to the motion picture industry. On April 19, 2019, the Amsterdam city council renamed bridge 771 the Jetta Goudal bridge in her honor, with the name tag installed in early 2020.

Nearly all of Goudal's Dutch Jewish relatives perished in the Holocaust. Her sister Bertha died in 1945 at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Bertha's husband, Nathan Beffie, died at the same camp in 1944. Bertha's son, Eduard Beffie, was killed at Sobibór extermination camp, as was Goudal's stepmother, Rosette Citroen, in 1943. The sole survivor among her close relatives was Bertha's daughter, Geertruida Beffie, who lived until 2013 and died in Pennsylvania.