Want to know the best Claudette Colbert movies? How about the worst Claudette Colbert movies? Curious about Claudette Colbert box office grosses or which Claudette Colbert movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Claudette Colbert movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which ones got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place…. because we have all of that information and much more.
Claudette Colbert (1903-1996) was a French-born American actress, who the American Film Institute ranked as one of the Top 50 Screen Legends of all time. Colbert is ranked as the 12th best actress, right behind #11 Barbara Stanwyck and right before #13 Grace Kelly. One of our goals is to do a movie page on all 50 Screen Legends. After completing this page we have now written movie pages on 47 (or 94%) of those performers……leaving only 2 actresses and 1 actor that still need movie pages.
Her IMDb page shows 81 acting credits from 1927-1987. This page will rank 48 Claudette Colbert movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Many of her silent movies, her shorts and some “talkies between 1929 and 1933 were not included in the tables. The reason? Lack of finding box office grosses. Striking out on all 4 of her 1933 movies was extremely disappointing.
Claudette Colbert Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort Claudette Colbert movies by co-stars of her movies
- Sort Claudette Colbert movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost.
- Sort Claudette Colbert movies by yearly domestic box office rank or trivia
- Sort Claudette Colbert movies by how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and Oscar® wins each Claudette Colbert movie received.
- Sort Claudette Colbert movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score. UMR puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
- Use the sort and search buttons to make this table very interactive. For example…if you type in “Fred MacMurray” in the search box….the 7 MacMurrray/Colbert movies will pop right up.
- Blue Link in Co-Star column will take you to that star’s UMR movie page
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Claudette Colbert Table
- Twenty-three Claudette Colbert movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 47.91% of her movies listed. Boom Town (1940) was her biggest box office hit.
- An average Claudette Colbert movie grosses $119.94 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 36 of Claudette Colbert’s movies are rated as good movies…or 75.00% of her movies. It Happened One Night (1934) was her highest rated movie while Royal Affairs in Versailies (1954) was her lowest rated movie.
- Fourteen Claudette Colbert movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 29.16% of her movies.
- Four Claudette Colbert movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 8.33% of her movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 40.00. 33 Claudette Colbert movies scored higher that average….or 68.75% of her movies. It Happened One Night (1934) got the the highest UMR Movie Score while Royal Affairs in Versailies (1954) got the lowest UMR Movie Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Claudette Colbert
1. Claudette Colbert was born Emilie Claudette Chauchoin on September 13, 1903, in Saint Mandé, France. Colbert was her maternal grandmother’s maiden name.
2. Claudette Colbert’s It Happened One Night (1934) won five major Academy Awards®: Best Picture, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Colbert), Best Director (Frank Capra) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert Riskin). Only two other movies have accomplished this Oscar® sweep….those two movies are 1975’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and 1991’s Silence of the Lambs.
3. Claudette Colbert and Frank Capra. Colbert’s 1st ever movie was 1927’s For The Love Of Mike. During the filming Colbert and Capra did not get along at all. After the completion of filming, Colbert told one and all, “I shall never make another film”. When Paramount loaned her out to film Capra’s It Happened One Night…she was not happy at all. The other star,Clark Gable, was not happy either (he had his own reasons). Then Gable and Colbert did not get along during filming. Well…..somehow all of that unhappiness resulted in the 166th best film of all-time (according to IMDb.com).
4. Claudette Colbert was married two times. Her first marriage was to actor, Norman Foster, from 1928 to 1935. Her second marriage was to Dr. Joel Pressman from 1935 until his death in 1968. She did not have any children.
5. Most shots of Claudette Colbert in her films were of her left profile. She considered her left side to be her best and only rarely allowed full face or right profile shots; an injury to her nose had created a bump on the right. Once an entire set had to be rebuilt so she would not have to show her right side, resulting in some cameramen calling the right side of her face “the dark side of the moon”.
6. Claudette Colbert was nominated for 3 Best Actress Oscars®. She won for 1934’s It Happened One Night. Her other nominations were for 1935’s Private Worlds and 1944’s Since You Went Away.
7. Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray appeared in seven movies together: The Gilded Lily (1935), The Bride Comes Home (1935), Maid of Salem (1937), No Time for Love (1943), Practically Yours (1944), The Egg and I (1947) and Family Honeymoon (1948).
8. Claudette Colbert was voted a Top 10 Box Office Star 3 times: She was 6th in 1935, 8th in 1936 and 9th in 1947.
9. Claudette Colbert had 14 movies that crossed the $100 million adjusted domestic box office mark. That ties her for 8th place when looking at all of the actresses that are in our database. Her movies grossed over $4.21 billion in adjusted domestic box office.
10. Check out Claudette Colbert’s movie career compared to current and classic stars on our Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time page.
America Film Institutes’ Top 25 Screen Legend Actress and UMR’s Links That Rank All Of Their Movies.
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences. Golden Globes® are the registered trademark and service mark of the Hollywood Foreign Press.
Thanks for sharing
You are welcome Anonymous. Thanks for stopping by.
Bruce:
I didn’t look at the photos on this page before. You need to fix an error here as you have a picture of John Barrymore and Carole Lombard from Twentieth Century and stated that Colbert is in it. Colbert has nothing to do wit the film.
Hey Flora….yep I missed that. Copy and paste got me. Usually there are only 3 pictures…but on the AFI performers there are 4 photos. Thanks for the heads up.
This is a big one Bruce. There is a lot of box office information here I didn’t have and I’m curious if you got quite a bit of it from a book or two? Thank you Bruce. I’ve been waiting for this one. Good job.
Hey Lyle….yep….I forgot to switch out that Lombard photo….normally I include 3 photos…but on the AFI ones I include 4 photos….but that one is gone….and The Palm Beach Story is now here.
As for the box office sources….a good chunk was from Variety. The MGM ledgers, RKO ledgers, and Warner Brothers helped out on about 10 of the movies.
Books provided more as well. Steinberg’s Reel Facts, Schatz’ Boom and Bust, Paramount Pretties, RKO Story, Soloman’s 20th Century Studio Box, Hollywood Great Love Teams, Eames’ the Paramount Story, Harrison’s Box Office Reports, a book on William Wanger, a book on DeMille….and that is just the ones I looked at in the last few weeks…I started researching this page about 4 months ago.
Feel good about almost all of the box office numbers….if anything some of the 1930s might be slightly OVERestimated. One of my latest discoveries might interest you….it is a 600 thesis from Australia. The last 100 pages have some pretty interesting tables. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/16687/1/Jonathan_Derek_Silver_Thesis.pdf
Hi, Bruce.
As I said on another page, I have not seen as many of Colbert’s movies as I think I have due to how often I have seen the titles I have seen. Some have been unavailable to me. Others I simply did not catch. I thought that I had set my PVR to record The Smiling Lieutenant but it hadn’t and I only figured this out with 30 minutes left.
This page will help me know what titles to look for made before she was listed first as well as her films with Fred M. Somehow I haven’t seen them.
The highest ranking movie I have seen is It Happened One Night at Number 1.
The highest ranking movie I have not seen is Since You Went Away at number 2.
The lowest raked movie I have seen is The Secret Fury at number 37 .
The Secret Fury is one of several movies I have seen for the first time in the last three months. It’s A Wonderful World is another one.
Among Colbert movies I haven’t seen yet is the epic Cleopatra.
Views by ranking:
I have seen 3 of the top 5
I have seen 6 of the top 10
I have seen 9 of the top 20
I have seen 11 of the top 30
I have seen only 14 movies of Claudette Colbert’s career.
Until Columbia started signing stars such as Glenn Ford and Judy Halliday, this studio made movies with stars on loan to the studio when they were having problems with their own studio. Gable was sent to Columbia as a punishment for It Happened One Night which was shot in just two weeks. Then he ends up with the Oscar.
My favourite Colbert movies so far are:
It Happened One Night
Tomorrow Is Forever
Boom Town
The Palm Beach Story
It’s A Wonderful World.
Movies on my to-see list are her movies with Fred, her movies with Robert Young, Cleopatra, any comedies and well, all of her films that I haven’t seen.
Congratulations on finishing all the AFI stars who made talkies 🙂
Cheers,
Flora
I mean non-silent stars on the AFI list. Obviously, two of the three remaining names made talkies.
Flora
Hey Flora….even Pickford made a few “talkies”…but almost all movie books…Gish, Keaton and Pickford are listed under the silent stars category. 3 more to go….getting so close.
Hey Flora.
1. Thanks for checking out my CC page….seems like I have been working on this page for a very very long time.
2. Sorry you missed The Smiling Lieutenant…that was her first hit and one that helped get her launched.
3. Her MacMurray made 7 movies together….I thought it was 6….there is a Screen Duos page here that needs to be fixed to show those 7 movies.
4. Tally count….Flora 14….me….counting….7….maybe Steve and I can combined total beat you on this one.
5. I have not seen Cleopatra or Since You Went Away. I thought I had seen Since You Went Away but reading the summary makes me think I have it mixed up another movie.
6. I am sure all involved with It Happened One Night were shocked it did so well….and that it would link them all together….even 80 plus years later.
7. I have seen 3 of your Top 5. Tomorrow Is Forever is one I want to watch….and It’s A Wonderful World has Stewart….so I know I will see that one soon.
8. Three mostly silent stars left….going to have to figure out how to do their pages…..cause not thinking the normally setup is going to work…..though Gish actually made many “talkies”.
Thanks for sharing your Colbert thoughts….it is of course greatly appreciated.
One of the greats
Hey T34….without a doubt one of the greats.