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 MandĂ©, 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:Â 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.
21 should be The Gilded Lily, no? Must have autocorrected to Lady.
Good catch….I wish I could blame that on autocorrect….but it is all on me. Fixed it on my website and my database. Thinking I need to be wearing my glasses….lol. Thanks for the headsup.
Caludette! I love Cleopatra, It Happened One Night, The Egg & I, Imitation of Life and sol many more.
Hey Vincent….she was a classic and all of the movies you mentioned are classics too.
I agree Bruce. She was one of the actors who could do drama as well as comedy equally well. I also thought she was very pretty. She has always been a favorite of mine.
After spending 4 months reading all about her….I can safely say I agree with you 100%. Not many people can go back and forth between comedy and drama….but she did and did very well.
Thanks Bruce. It was all the information you had on the early Paramount films that really impressed me. I thank you for all the research you did on this page. And thanks for the book information as well. Finding Box Office information on Paramount, Columbia and Universal Studies older films had always been hard to find. Thanks again.
Hey Lyle….I am so glad to finally be done with Lombard and Colbert…..very frustrating. Like putting a puzzle together when you do not have all the pieces. Maybe one day somebody will find some Paramount ledgers in an attic locked away in a trunk….and that information will finally see the light of day….hey I can dream….lol.
This is great. But, is it me or was Midnight (1939) not on the list? I could have missed it. Overall, the list is pretty great. And I’m also a bit surprised to see Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) not in the top 10.
Thank you thank you. Great catch Carol. At first I was like…Midnight is in there…she must not have used the search button. But when I looked it was indeed not there. Very weird my database kicked it out….though my wife would say I kicked it out of the database. I did a page that looked at 1939…luckily all the information was still on that page….so Midnight is now in the rankings. Sitting in 16th place overall…and all the way up to 2nd when you sort her movies by critic and audience rating…thank you again.
As for Bluebeard’s Eight Wife….it was her 15th biggest hit….ranked all the way down in 43rd place when looking at critic and audience voting…and got no Oscar love. That easily knocked it out of the overall Top 10…but when you are dealing with a person that has so many great movies…even movies in the Top 25 are still good movies. I greatly appreciate you checking out my Colbert page and giving some great feedback. You are awesome!
Midnight is probably my favorite along with It Happened one Night, so that’s why it came to mind right away. You’re very welcome!
Only two left from the AFI actresses, not bad Bruce. Just don’t expect an impressive view count from me on those two silent movie legends. 🙂
My favorite Claudette Colbert film has to be It Happened One Night, one of those films like Casablanca where everything just seems to click perfectly.
Boom Town is another film I revisit often. Teaming up with Gable again. I also enjoyed the two DeMille epics Sign of the Cross and Cleopatra.
Looking at the list I’ve only seen 7 of her films, I’ve mentioned 4 the other 3 are Drums Along the Mohawk, It’s a Wonderful World and The Palm Beach Story. So I’ve seen 5 from the UMR chart and 5 from the critics chart. I would like to see some of the others eventually.
Looking at your fact file, so it was 41 years before another film won the 5 major Oscar awards -Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay – after It Happened One Night did it in 1934, wow! Cuckoo’s Nest in 75 and later Silence of the Lambs in 91.
Excellent work Bruce. Voted Up!
Hey Steve.
1. Thanks for stopping by and checking out my latest and greatest page.
2. Yep two actresses to go. Both will be pretty hard to find box office nuggets.
3. Your Pickford tally has a great chance to top me….as I have not seen a single Pickford movie.
4. It Happened One Night is still a fun entertaining movie….doing this page has me thinking it is time to watch it again.
5. Tally count…Flora 14….you and me at 7….so combined we managed to tie Flora….proud day for us. Granted…5 of our movies are the same….but we will take a tie.
6. I somehow forgot Midnight….it ended up being her 2nd best reviewed movie…and that probably messing up your comment.
7. Yep 41 years from One Night to One Flew….then 16 years to Silence…..it will not happen this year….so it will reach 25 years since it happened last.
Thanks for your Colbert thoughts.