Claudette Colbert's mixture of beauty, sophistication, wit, and vivacity quickly made her one of the film industry's most famous and highest-paid stars of the 1930's and 1940's. Though she began her career on the New York stage, she was beloved for her roles in such films as Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story , Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra , and Frank Capra's It Happened One Night , for which she won an Academy Award. She showed remarkable prescience by becoming one of the first Hollywood stars to embrace television, and she also |