Happy Birthday, Claudette Colbert! The actress would have turned 107 today. The native of France, who moved to New York as a kid, initially set out to become a fashion designer when she took a bit part in the 1923 play “The Wild Westcotts.” Two years later, she fully yielded to the lights of the Great White Way, getting her big break in the 1927 show “The Barker,” in which she played a snake charmer. Though she was likely costumed in a sexy and exotic getup — aren’t all snake charmers? — WWD ran a portrait of Colbert, in a promo for the play, looking quite the Twenties girl in long pearl strands and a graphic-print dress — her signature bangs not yet in place. The following year, her photo ran again, this time tied to the play “The Ghost Train.” (By then, she had exchanged the wavy bob for a slight ’fro.)
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Fast forward to 1985. After decades spent as one of the top screwball actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age, Colbert appeared again on the New York stage in “Aren’t We All?” with Rex Harrison. Seven years earlier, the two had co-starred in the play “The Kingfisher.” “We only met at parties. We never worked together,” said Colbert in an interview with WWD that April. “Suddenly, here in — shall we call them our later years? — we’ve almost become a team.” Of course, the Astaire to her Rogers was, most famously, Clark Gable. “It was male incarnate, you know,” she recalled. “My husband always said the only man he would ever forgive me leaving him for would have been Gable.”
Colbert, dressed in a crisp white Adolfo suit paired with pearls, had plenty to discuss about fashion, too. “Before Adolfo came into my life,” she proclaimed, “I had Chanel. What they’re doing today with these exaggerated shoulders and the big floppy looks, unless you’re 5 foot 10 and weigh 110 pounds, you should stay away from that kind of thing. Most women I’ve seen who do try to wear it and shouldn’t, look like bag ladies. I tried on something just the day before yesterday, and I swear to you, I thought, ‘Well, who will I tackle?’”
As for her hair, in a Nancy Reagan-esque crop, Colbert noted she still cut and colored it herself — and always had. “Every time I talk about [letting my hair go gray],” she said, “all my friends start screaming. So every three weeks, I dive into the Clairol.”