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Claudette Colbert: Barker
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At the age of eighteen she was offered a small part in “The Wild Westcotts,” debuting under the name Claudette Colbert. The opportunity forever changed her ambitions. Following that production, she worked in a dress shop to pay for dramatic training. During her early years on stage, she fought against being typecast as a French maid, but was finally able to savor her first critical success on Broadway in the production of “The Barker”; portraying the role of a snake charmer. The following year she made the big leap to her first film role in a silent movie entitled For the Love of Mike. The film told the story of three men banding together to raise an adopted son. Frank Capra, who directed the movie, later stated that he considered it to be the worst film of his entire career.
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At first Colbert planned to become a fashion designer, but a growing interest in dramatics led her to Broadway. She became respected and popular primarily as a result of her 1927 performance as a carnival snake charmer in The Barker, a success which led inevitably to a film career. Her first big hit was as the seductress, Empress Poppaea, in Cecil B. DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, and she might have become typed as a villainess had she not been assigned to It Happened One Night.
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In 1928, Colbert married Norman Foster, an actor and director, who appeared with Colbert in the Broadway show The Barker. However, she and her first husband lived apart, never sharing a home together in Hollywood.[34] They divorced in 1935, and in December of that year, Colbert married Dr. Joel Pressman, a surgeon at UCLA.[2] The marriage lasted 33 years, until Pressman's death of liver cancer in 1968.
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