Claudette Colbert, 1903-1996

UPON COMPLETING HER first movie in 1927, honey-voiced actress Claudette Colbert announced that ""Films are not for me -- they're off my list permanently.'' She spoke too soon. By the time she died at her home in Barbados last Tuesday at the age of 93, she'd broken her word more than 60 times, to the delight of movie-lovers everywhere.

Colbert, who was born Lily Claudette Chauchoin in Paris, first made her name on Broadway but, once coaxed back to film, became one of early Hollywood's great leading ladies, starring alongside the likes of John Barrymore, Gary Cooper, Henry Fonda and Clark Gable. It was with Gable, in the 1934 comedy ""It Happened One Night,'' that she won her sole Oscar. Colbert's performance as an insouciant heiress pursued by a frisky reporter displayed the gift for comic timing and air of calm superiority that marked much of her work. She was not just a comic actress, however. Witness Colbert's turn as Empress Poppaea in Cecil B. DeMille's ""The Sign of the Cross'' (1932), which boasts the famous milk-bath scene that made her a sex symbol. For all her successes, she did have one complaint. ""I just never had the luck to play bitches,'' she once said. ""Those are the only parts that ever register, really.'' Once again, she was being too pessimistic.

© 1996