Anne Baxter (May 7, 1923 – December 12, 1985) was an American actress, star of Hollywood films, Broadway productions, and television series. She won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe, and was nominated for an Emmy.
Baxter was born May 7, 1923, in Michigan City, Indiana, to Catherine Dorothy Baxter (née Wright; 1894–1979), whose father was the architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright, and Kenneth Stuart Baxter (1893–1977), an executive with the Seagram Company.
When Baxter was five, she appeared in a school play. When she was six, her family moved to New York, where she continued to act. She was raised in Westchester County, New York[1] and attended Brearley.[2]
At age 10, Baxter attended a Broadway play starring Helen Hayes where she was so impressed she declared to her family she wanted to become an actress. By age 13, she had appeared on Broadway in Seen but Not Heard. During this period, Baxter learned her acting craft as a student of actress and teacher Maria Ouspenskaya.
In 1939, she was cast as Katharine Hepburn's younger sister in the play The Philadelphia Story, although Hepburn did not like Baxter's acting style, and Baxter was replaced during the show's pre-Broadway run. Rather than giving up, she turned to Hollywood.[3]
At 16, Baxter screen-tested for the role of Mrs. DeWinter in Rebecca. Director Alfred Hitchcock deemed Baxter too young for the role, but she soon secured a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox. In 1940, she was loaned to MGM for her first film 20 Mule Team, in which she was billed fourth after Wallace Beery, Leo Carrillo, and Marjorie Rambeau. She worked with John Barrymore in her next film The Great Profile (1940) and appeared as the ingénue in the Jack Benny vehicle Charley's Aunt (1941). She received star billing in Swamp Water (1941) and The Pied Piper (1942), which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Anne Baxter in 1943 with United States Army soldiers
Baxter co-starred with Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney in 1946's The Razor's Edge, for which she won both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress. Baxter later recounted that The Razor's Edge contained her only great performance, a hospital scene where the character Sophie "loses her husband, child and everything else." She said she relived the death of her brother, who had died at age three.[6]
In 1950, Baxter was chosen to co-star in All About Eve largely because of a resemblance to Claudette Colbert, who originally was cast but dropped out and was replaced by Bette Davis. The original idea was to have Baxter's character gradually come to mirror Colbert's over the course of the film. Baxter received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for the title role of Eve Harrington. She said she modeled the role on a bitchy understudy she had for her debut performance in the Broadway play Seen but Not Heard at the age of 13 and who had threatened to "finish her off."[6]
In June 1954, Baxter won the part of the Egyptian princess and queen Nefertari in Cecil B. DeMille's award-winning The Ten Commandments.[9] Her scenes were shot on Paramount's sound stages in 1955, and she attended the film's New York and Los Angeles premieres in November 1956. Despite criticisms of her interpretation of Nefertari, DeMille and The Hollywood Reporter both thought her performance was "very good",[10][11] and The New York Daily News described her as "remarkably effective".[12] For her work in The Ten Commandments, she won a Laurel Award for Topliner Female Dramatic Performance.[7] She later remembered the film in an interview:
DeMille asked me to come in. His office at Paramount was bursting with books, props, rolls of linens. I told him I'd have to wear an Egyptian false nose and he pounded the table. "No. Baxter, your Irish nose stays in this picture." He acted out my part and I kept nodding, and I walked out with the part. The sound stage sets were magnificent. It was all corny, sure, but DeMille knew it was corny—that's what he wanted, what he loved. I loved slinking around—really, this was silent film acting but with dialogue.[5]
In 1960, Baxter received a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6741 Hollywood Boulevard.[13]
Later career
Baxter worked regularly in television in the 1960s. She appeared as one of the mystery guests on What's My Line? She also starred as guest villain Zelda The Great in episodes 9 and 10 of the Batman series. She appeared as another villain, Olga, Queen of the Cossacks, opposite Vincent Price's Egghead in three episodes of the show's third season. She played an old flame of Raymond Burr on his crime series Ironside. Baxter made a guest appearance on My Three Sons season 8 episode 10, aired on November 4, 1967, called "Designing Woman", portraying a glamorous female engineer who wanted Steve Douglas (Fred MacMurray) as a love interest and possible future husband.[citation needed]
In the 1970s, Baxter was a frequent guest and guest host on The Mike Douglas Show. She portrayed a murderous film star on an episode of Columbo, titled "Requiem for a Falling Star". In 1971, she had a role in Fools' Parade as an aging prostitute. In 1983, Baxter starred in the television series Hotel, replacing her All About Eve costar Bette Davis after the latter became ill.[citation needed]
Baxter married actor John Hodiak on July 7, 1946,[14] at her parents' home in Burlingame, California.[15] The couple had one daughter, Katrina, born in 1951. They divorced in 1953. At the time, she said they were "basically incompatible",[16] but in her book she blamed herself for the separation: "I had loved John as much", she wrote. "But we'd eventually congealed in the longest winter in the world. Daily estrangement. Things unsaid. Even a fight would have warmed us. To my shame, I'd picked one at last in order to unfreeze the word 'divorce'."[17]
In the mid-1950s, Baxter began a relationship with Gambino gangster Filippo Autelitano and later, her publicist Russell Birdwell, who took control of her career and directed her in The Come On (1956).[5] The couple formed Baxter-Birdwell Productions to make films on a 10-year plan; Baxter would star in the films and Birdwell would work behind the camera.[18]Princeton University Library has a collection of 175 letters by Baxter to Birdwell.[19]
In 1960, Baxter married a second time to Randolph Galt, an American owner of a cattle station at Gloucester near Sydney where she was filming Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. After the birth of their second daughter, Maginel, back in California, Galt unexpectedly announced that they were moving to a 4,452 hectares (11,000 acres) ranch south of Grants, New Mexico.[20] They then moved to Hawaii (his home state) before settling back in Brentwood, California.[21] Baxter and Galt were divorced in 1969. In 1976, Baxter recounted her courtship with Galt (whom she called "Ran") in a well-received book called Intermission. Melissa Galt, Baxter's first daughter with Galt, became an interior designer and then a business coach, speaker, and seminar provider.[22] Maginel became a cloistered Catholic nun, reportedly living in Rome.[23][24] After 11 years in Italy and 20 years living monastic life, Maginel left religion altogether.[25]
In 1977, Baxter married David Klee, a stockbroker. It was a brief marriage; Klee died unexpectedly from illness. The newlywed couple had purchased a sprawling property in Easton, Connecticut, which they extensively remodeled; however, Klee did not live to see the renovations completed. Although she maintained a residence in West Hollywood, Baxter considered her Connecticut home to be her primary residence.
Baxter had a stroke on December 4, 1985, while hailing a taxi on Madison Avenue in New York City.[28] She remained on life support for eight days in New York's Lenox Hill Hospital, until family members agreed that brain function had ceased, and she died on December 12, at the age of 62.[29][1][30]
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