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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/10/03/ST2008100302864.html

HOLLYWOOD ROUNDUP

Star Light, Star Bright

With grace, passion and tongues occasionally in cheeks, these four silver screen idols made dancing and acting onscreen look easy. Reviewed by John DiLeo Sunday, October 5, 2008; Page BW08

CLAUDETTE COLBERT She Walked in Beauty By Bernard F. Dick | Univ. of Mississippi. 329 pp. $30

This biography subjects a scintillating actress's career to diligent film-by-film analysis. French-born and Manhattan-raised, Claudette Colbert was a star on Broadway before bringing her light touch and breezy sophistication to 1930s Hollywood. Though best remembered as one of the movies' premier comediennes in sparklers like "The Gilded Lily" and "Midnight," Colbert also scored in straight drama, notably in "Since You Went Away" and "Three Came Home," a pair of World War II-themed pictures.

Colbert showed her versatility in 1934 when she lent her tongue-in-cheek wit to the title role in Cecil B. DeMille's "Cleopatra"; contributed an Oscar-winning performance to Frank Capra's romantic comedy "It Happened One Night"; and played the lead in the tearjerker "Imitation of Life." That trifecta inspires Bernard F. Dick's most perceptive and absorbing writing, particularly the detail with which he charts each film's transition to the screen from source materials. But Dick botches his discussion of another Colbert peak, her role as the practical wife of an impractical inventor in the screwball classic "The Palm Beach Story." He painfully overanalyzes that high-spirited lark, joylessly beating out every laugh.

Whispers about Colbert's lesbianism make Dick uncomfortable, but the irony is that he inadvertently presents a believable case for it. Dick doesn't find it bizarre that Colbert and her first husband, Norman Foster, never lived together, accepting the excuse that Colbert's mother hated Foster and wouldn't have him in their home. Each fact Dick dredges up makes the marriage sound more like one of convenience. Regarding her second husband, Joel Pressman, we're told that Colbert never had the passion for him that she had for Foster (a passion that denied itself overnight stays). Pressman vanishes from the book for decades, having no discernible connection to Colbert's life; theirs is described as a relationship in which "companionship and compatibility take on greater importance than sex," even though Colbert was merely 32 when they married. Dick accuses those who would "out" Colbert of wishful thinking, but he may be guilty of that tendency himself: Colbert left most of her fortune to her longtime female companion.