Word: colbert
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1981-1981
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...almost played were Blanche du Bois in the Broadway version of A Streetcar Named Desire and Margo Channing in All About Eve. But movie contracts kept her from the first part and a skiing accident from the second, which went to Bette Davis. In A Talent for Murder, Colbert is playing for fun once again, as a witty but alcoholic writer of mysteries whose avaricious family is trying 10 put her away so that they can enjoy her fortune. One of them is killed and the question of course is: Whodunit...
Part of the play's problem is that Authors Norman Panama and Jerome Chodorov cannot make up their own minds. The identity of the killer has been changed three times, requiring extensive rewriting and relearning of lines. Beyond that, Colbert is supposed to be crippled and must navigate the stage in an electric wheelchair; but the obstreperous machine just won't work right. "I'm black-and-blue from that damned thing," she complains...
...time the "damned thing" arrives on Broadway, it is safe to say that it will have met its mistress. "Tough dame, that lovely frog," said Frank Capra, who directed her in It Happened One Night. When she sets her mind to do something, Colbert does it. Period. "I don't have any patience with people who say I can't.' " she says. "You can do anything you want...
That determination doubtless came from her mother and grandmother. Father, a minor bank functionary who brought the family to the U.S. in 1906, when Colbert was three, was overshadowed by those two feuding, formidable little women. Colbert's favorite was grandmère. "There's an old saying," she says: "Why do grandparents and grandchildren get along so well? They have the same enemy-the mother...
...Colbert loves acting, though it was never an obsession for her, as it was for some of her contemporaries, like Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn. "I never thought of my career as the primary thing in my life," she says. "I looked upon acting as a job, and now, frankly, I regret it. I think of all the things I could have done. I just let parts come to me. I never went after them." Still, that seems to be about all she regrets, and if Colbert, radiant and ageless, is not happy, who is? "She's been drinking...