Trivia of Anne Baxter

Trivia of Anne Baxter (7 May 1923 - 12 December 1985)

*When she was a child, she fell out of a sled and broke her nose. She never fixed it because she wanted to be known for talent and not her appearance.

*At age 10, Baxter attended a Broadway play starring Helen Hayes, and she was so impressed that she declared to her family that she wanted to become an actress. By age 13, she had appeared on Broadway in Seen but Not Heard. During this period, Baxter learned her acting craft as a student of actress and teacher Maria Ouspenskaya.

*A 14-year-old Baxter was called in to test with a youthful Montgomery Clift as Tom, but the actor's acne was so bad at the time that the test was never made and both were sent back to New York by producer David O. Selznick.

*In 1939, she was cast as Katharine Hepburn's younger sister in the play The Philadelphia Story, but Hepburn did not like Baxter's acting style, and Baxter was replaced during the show's pre-Broadway run. Rather than giving up, she turned to Hollywood.

*Baxter co-starred with Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney in The Razor's Edge (1946), for which she won both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. Baxter later recounted that The Razor's Edge contained her only great performance, a hospital scene where the character Sophie "loses her husband, child and everything else." She said she relived the death of her brother, who had died at age three.

*While Bette Davis and Anne were both the stars of All About Eve (1950), it was thought that they would both stand a better chance at Oscar trophies if Anne were to be placed in the "Supporting Actress" category, thus avoiding each canceling the other out. Anne refused to be put in the supporting category. Sure enough, both actresses were nominated for "Best Actress" Oscars and both lost to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday (1950).

*She was the 20th Century Fox studio's choice to play Bathsheba in David and Bathsheba (1951), but director Henry King told her he didn't think she could portray a biblical queen and gave the part to Susan Hayward. Baxter left the studio in 1953 and got her revenge the following year, when Cecil B. DeMille chose her for the role of the Egyptian queen Nefretiri in The Ten Commandments (1956), which turned out to be the most financially successful biblical movie ever made.