Born in Paris, raised in New York, crowned in Hollywood — the most technically accomplished comic actress of the screwball era and the only woman to match Clark Gable line for line, glance for glance, and come out ahead.
Portrait · Claudette Colbert
Born Émilie Claudette Chauchoin on September 13, 1903, in Saint-Mandé, Paris — her family emigrated to New York when she was six, and she grew up bilingual in lower Manhattan. She studied fashion design before drifting into theatre in the mid-1920s, landing on Broadway under her adopted name and quickly establishing herself as an actress of unusual wit and precision.
Paramount signed her in 1929. She proved equally capable of Cecil B. DeMille spectacle — Cleopatra (1934), in which she reputedly bathed in asses' milk — and intimate comedy. Her Oscar came for It Happened One Night (1934), opposite Clark Gable, though she accepted the award at a train station before boarding a cross-country trip, having been told she hadn't won. She was brought back and the ceremony waited.
Her partnership with director Preston Sturges produced two of the finest screwball comedies ever made: The Palm Beach Story (1942) and the earlier Remember the Night (1940). Sturges understood her particular genius — an intelligence so quick it registered as lightness, a warmth that could turn frosty without warning — and built films around it. Her Gerry Jeffers in The Palm Beach Story is a masterclass in getting what you want while pretending you're not sure what you want.
She retired from films in the early 1960s, moving to Barbados, where she lived for the rest of her long life, making occasional stage and television appearances into her eighties. She died in 1996, aged ninety-two — the longest life of any major Hollywood star of the classic era.
Colbert accepted the role only after her fee demands were met and then determined to hate every moment of it. What the camera caught instead was a performer at the height of her powers — the hitchhiking scene, the Walls of Jericho, the finale — all executed with a precision that looked like spontaneity. The best trick of her career was making it look like Gable's film while ensuring it was hers.
The film opens with a prologue that raises more questions than it answers and never explains itself — Sturges trusted Colbert to carry the contradiction, and she does. Her Gerry is the most modern of screwball heroines: she knows exactly what she's doing, and does it anyway, with full knowledge of the irony. The Ale and Quail Club sequence is the funniest single scene in 1940s comedy.
DeMille's Cleopatra requires its actress to be at once regal, sensual, politically ruthless, and ultimately tragic — a range that most actresses of the era would have distributed across several films. Colbert does it in one, with the milk bath and the barge and the asp, and makes none of it ridiculous. She is the best Cleopatra the screen has produced, and she did it twenty-nine years before Elizabeth Taylor.
The comedy had always been rooted in intelligence; here the intelligence is rooted in love, and the result is a performance of sustained emotional dignity that surprised everyone who knew her only from the screwball films. Anne Hilton's grace under the accumulating pressures of wartime absence is one of Hollywood's finest portraits of practical courage.
I have always liked the opposite of what I was supposed to like, which has made my life very interesting and my directors very nervous.
Claudette Colbert is the finest comic actress of the screwball era and one of the most technically accomplished performers Hollywood has produced — a woman whose intelligence was so fast it registered as effortlessness, and whose effortlessness concealed a precision that directors only fully appreciated when they tried to replicate it with someone else. Nobody could.
The hitchhiking scene in It Happened One Night — in which she lifts her skirt to stop traffic where Gable's thumb has failed — is the defining image of her career and one of Hollywood's great unscripted moments. It was her idea. Of course it was.