Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty

Claudette Colbert’s mixture of beauty, sophistication, wit, and vivacity quickly made her one of the film industry’s most famous and highest-paid stars of the 1930s and 1940s. Though Colbert (1903-1996) began her career on the New York stage, she was beloved for her roles in such films as Preston Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story, Cecil B. DeMille’s Cleopatra, and Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, for which she won an Academy Award. She showed remarkable prescience by becoming one of the first Hollywood stars to embrace television, and she also returned to Broadway in her later career.

Bernard F. Dick chronicles Colbert’s long career but also explores her early life in Paris and New York. Along with discussing how she left her mark on Broadway, Hollywood, radio, and television, the book explores Colbert’s lifelong interests in painting, fashion design, and commercial art. Using correspondence, interviews, periodicals, film archives, and other research materials, the biography reveals a smart, talented actress who conquered Hollywood and remains one of America’s most captivating screen icons.

Bernard F. Dick is professor of communication and English at Fairleigh Dickinson University and is author of many books, including The Musicals of Cole Porter: Broadway, Hollywood, Television; The Golden Age Musicals of Darryl F. Zanuck: The Gentleman Preferred Blondes; That Was Entertainment: The Golden Age of the MGM Musical; The Screen Is Red: Hollywood, Communism, and the Cold War; The President’s Ladies: Jane Wyman and Nancy Davis; Hollywood Madonna: Loretta Young; and Forever Mame: The Life of Rosalind Russell, all published by University Press of Mississippi.