Bernard F. Dick has written an elegant, clear-eyed biography of Hollywood's smartest and most self-possessed screen star, a woman who could order a director out of her trailer for going too fast (or too slow) and who hid a will of steel and an exacting need for control behind a glamorous screen presence. The paperback edition of Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty (University Press of Mississippi), is the latest entry in UPOM's admirable Hollywood Legends series, and like those other books it is at pains to present its subject whole, shunning easy mythmaking and gossip. Dick's biography is carefully researched, deeply contextualized, and as sober and controlled as his subject. It covers Colbert's life from a Parisian childhood to her days as one of the most powerful actresses in the Golden Age, and like the best of Colbert's work, it is refined, disciplined, and quietly authoritative.
Review by Allan R. Ellenberger
CLAUDETTE COLBERT: SHE WALKED IN BEAUTY
by Bernard F. Dick
University Press of Mississippi
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The biography covers Colbert's early life in France and New York, providing the backstory for her later screen self with a worldly childhood and a rigorously Francophone education in language, art, and self-sufficiency. Dick does particularly well in the chapters on Colbert's early years on Broadway, showing her development of timing, diction, and use of space well before Hollywood's cameras captured it. It also stresses what so many biographies of Colbert leave out: she was never merely a "product of the studio system." Colbert arrived in Hollywood as a trained professional who knew about performance and contracts and who appreciated the importance of negotiating for power in an industry built to withhold it from women.
At the heart of the book is Colbert’s stranglehold on 1930s and 1940s cinema when she was one of the highest-paid and most bankable actors in Hollywood. Dick pays special attention to her Academy Award–winning performance in It Happened One Night, where her particular combination of wit, modernity, and emotional precision first crystallized. Instead of seeing the film as an isolated peak, Dick situates it in a larger arc of performances, from The Palm Beach Story to Cleopatra to many others in between, that demonstrates Colbert’s uncanny ability to move from screwball comedy to historical spectacle to intimate drama without sacrificing her essential identity. Beauty, Dick argues, was only part of her appeal: intelligence and control were the true motors of her longevity.
One of the book's most appealing qualities is Dick's choice to focus on Colbert's career and not her personal life. Dick discusses her films, professional choices, and work habits much more than to personal drama, making this less a traditional cradle-to-grave biography and more an insightful examination of a developing body of work. I found this emphasis to be both interesting and welcome, because it allows Colbert's smarts, self-discipline, and artistry to shine without descending into gossip or manufactured intimacy.
Audience reaction to Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty has generally been less positive than that, especially among readers who have not previously known about the book. Many have been appreciative of Bernard F. Dick's extensive research and close reading of archival materials, but some have found it to be a case of too much information. Readers have expressed exasperation at being immersed for long stretches in the careers of bit players and getting more plot summaries of Colbert's stage and film performances than they might reasonably be expected to sit through in one lifetime—cumulatively a bit on the dry or repetitive side, in short, for an actress remembered for being lively and lustrous.
That same exhaustive thoroughness, on the other hand, is the aspect of the book most highly valued by its fans: a veritable effort to track down every job in Colbert's career (especially the lesser ones) as a way of showing off her professionalism, discipline and workaday life rather than the gloss and anecdote. Readers not enamored of the old Hollywood stars or Colbert in particular might find the book a slog, but it is very much to be recommended to fans of serious career-based star studies.
At the same time, some academic readers have noted that Dick's narrative style is documentary more than dramatic, favoring the careful accumulation of fact to novelistic flourish. This is a fair criticism—but also a strength. The book's restraint feels appropriate for a subject who distrusted exaggeration and valued precision.
In the end, Claudette Colbert: She Walked in Beauty works because the form fits the subject. Dick neither sensationalizes Colbert’s life, nor underplays its complexity. He portrays her as a creative, strategic, and profoundly intelligent woman who found her way in Hollywood on her own terms, and as a result built a career that was both glittering and obsessively managed. The biography thereby returns Colbert to her proper place not just as a screen legend, but as one of classic American cinema’s most formidable artists. If you care about Golden Age Hollywood, star-making, or the creative work that goes into natural-seeming glamour, this is a must-read.
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