Claudette Colbert

 Claudette Colbert (September 13, 1903 – July 30, 1996),

Colbert began her career in Broadway productions during the late 1920s, progressing to film with the advent of talking pictures. Initially associated with Paramount Pictures, Colbert later gradually shifted to working as a freelance actress. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress in It Happened One Night (1934), and also received Academy Award nominations for Private Worlds (1935) and Since You Went Away (1944). With her round apple-face, Colbert was known as an expert screwball comedian, but her dramatic range enabled her to easily encompass melodrama. During her career, Colbert starred in more than sixty movies. She was the industry's biggest box-office star in 1938 and 1942. By the early 1950s, she had largely retired from the screen in favor of television and stage work, earning a Tony Award nomination for The Marriage-Go-Round in 1959. Her career tapered off during the early 1960s, but in the late 1970s she experienced a career resurgence in theater, earning a Sarah Siddons Award for her Chicago theater work in 1980. For her television work in The Two Mrs. Grenvilles (1987) she won a Golden Globe Award and received an Emmy Award nomination. Following a series of small strokes during the last three years of her life, Colbert died in 1996 at her second home in Barbados, where she was employing one housekeeper and two cooks. Colbert’s body was shipped to New York for cremation. A requiem mass was later held at Church of St. Vincent Ferrer in New York City. Her ashes are buried in the Godings Bay Church Cemetery, Speightstown, Saint Peter, Barbados.