Paulette Goddard Movies

goddard-111111Want to know the best Paulette Goddard movies?  How about the worst Paulette Goddard movies?  Curious about Paulette Goddard box office grosses or which Paulette Goddard movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Paulette Goddard movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.

Paulette Goddard (1910-1990) was an Oscar®-nominated American actress.  Goddard went from being a child model to a Ziegfeld girl to Charlie Chaplin’s leading lady (on screen and off screen) to one of the most popular stars of the 1940s.     Paulette Goddard’s IMDb page shows 64 acting credits from 1929-1972.  This page will rank 38 Paulette Goddard movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Her television appearances, uncredited roles, shorts and her last movie, Time of Indifference (could not find box office)  were not included in the rankings. 

Drivel Part:  This page comes from a request by Søren.  We want to take a moment and thank Søren.  Thank you Søren…your support is greatly appreciated.  Søren has been reading, commenting and making movie subject suggestions since 2011.  From Hub Pages to Cogerson Movie Score to Ultimate Movie Rankings, Søren has been along for the ride….thank you again….hope you like your Paulette Goddard page.

Paulette Goddard and Charlie Chaplin in 1936's Modern Times
Paulette Goddard and Charlie Chaplin in 1936’s Modern Times

Paulette Goddard 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 Paulette Goddard movies by co-stars of her movies
  • Sort Paulette Goddard movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort Paulette Goddard movies by yearly domestic box office rank
  • Sort Paulette Goddard 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 how many Oscar® wins each Paulette Goddard movie received.
  • Sort Paulette Goddard movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR)Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
  • Blue link in Co-star column takes you to that star’s UMR movie page

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Paulette Goddard Table

  1. Seventeen Paulette Goddard movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark.  That is a percentage of 44.73% of her movies listed. Modern Times (1936) was her biggest box office hit.
  2. An average Paulette Goddard movie grossed $114.50 million in adjusted box office gross.
  3. Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  18 Paulette Goddard movies are rated as good movies…or 64.00% of her movies.  Modern Times (1936) is her highest rated movie while Charge of the Lancers (1954) is her lowest rated movie.
  4. Ten Paulette Goddard movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 26.31% of her movies.
  5. Two Paulette Goddard movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 5.26% of her movies.
  6. An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 40.00.  20 Paulette Goddard movies scored higher that average….or 52.63% of her movies. The Great Dictator (1940) got the the highest UMR Score while Charge of the Lancers (1954) got the lowest UMR Score.
Susan Hayward & Paulette Goddard in 1942's Reap The Wild Wind
Susan Hayward & Paulette Goddard in 1942’s Reap The Wild Wind

Possibly Interesting Facts About Paulette Goddard

1. Marion Levy was born on Long Island, New York in 1910.

2. In 1926, she was hired by Florenz Ziegfeld to appear in the stage play No Foolin’.  For her debut she changed her name to Paulette Goddard.

3. Paulette Goddard arrived in Hollywood in 1929.  She would appear in many shorts (including two with Laurel and Hardy) and uncredited roles from 1929 to 1935.

4.  Paulette Goddard was cast by Charlie Chaplin (her boyfriend at the time) as the leading lady in his classic movie Modern Times (1936).   Goddard and Chaplin were married after they filmed the movie and would remain married until 1942.

5. Paulette Goddard was the leading contender for the role of Scarlett O’Hara in 1939’s Gone with the Wind. Her inability to produce a marriage certificate to prove she and Charles Chaplin were married, and the appearance of Vivien Leigh on the scene, lost her the part.

6. During the filming of 1939’s The Women….Rosalind Russell actually bit Paulette Goddard in their fight sequence. Despite the permanent scar the bite left Goddard, the actresses remained friends.

7. More trivia from 1939’s The Women…..their are over 130 roles in this movie, all played by women….even the animals shown in the movie were female.

8. Paulette Goddard was nominated for one acting Oscar®….she received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for 1943’s So Proudly We Hail!.

9.  Paulette Goddard was married four times and had no children. Her most famous marriage was to Chaplin….the one that surprised us was her marriage to Burgess “Rocky” Meredith.

10. Paulette Goddard would not do a dangerous stunt in Cecil B. Demille‘s Unconquered (1947).  Five years later DeMille rejected her acceptance of a key role in 1952’s The Greatest Show on Earth and cast Gloria Grahame, instead.  That was pretty the end of her career as she sent the rest of career in low budget B movies and retired in 1954.

Check out Paulette Goddard‘s career compared to current and classic actors.  Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.  Golden Globe® is a registered trademark.

49 thoughts on “Paulette Goddard Movies

  1. COMMENTS ON PAULETTE GODDARD VIDEO
    (1) Low opening marking of 5 but you have given us enough of her stand-alone films to show that Paulette although never classed among the very greatest of actresses such as Hepburn, Davis and Bergman [my personal A listers] made a contribution that entitles her to be regarded as an important star of her times. So far she has not made Bruce’s Top 100 Greatest stars but if he had included her she would come in around No 53 as he has given her an excellent adjusted total box office gross of nearly $4.4 billion for just 38 movies

    (2) Throughout your selections are some of the sauciest posters that I have yet seen from you with the best being possibly Diary of Chambermaid and The Lady has Plans. I especially liked also the posters for Forrest Rangers and the two Cooper films.

    (3) Super colour still of Paulette and the Duke and ‘scary’ one of Hope and her from Cat and the Canary. The latter is my favourite Hope movie and I am glad you thought well of it. Other black and white stills were also impressive such as solo of Paulette from a Chaplin movie. Bruce too has provided a nice miniature above of Paulette/Charlie from Modern Times

    (4) I suppose that the Chaplin films being No 1 and 2 was virtually obligatory. I can’t really remember much about them but I doubt if too many viewers and readers would disagree with you. You and Bruce agree on 4 of the Top 5.

    1. Thanks Bob, glad you liked the video. I remembered Bruce’s recent Goddard page and wanted to do a video on this lovely actress.

      I knew the Chaplin films would be at the top, I admit I’m not the biggest Chaplin fan I prefer Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy from that era. Modern Times is my favorite Chaplin movie, it’s the least sentimental of his films.

      I’m a big fan of Cat and the Canary and The Ghost Breakers, if it was up to me they would be at the top of this chart.

      I’m still surprised at the amount of films Fred MacMurray was starring in before he became a Disney favorite, seems that nearly every video I put together includes one or two of his films.

      1. 1 Another one with the Goddard/Leigh looks was Hedy Lamarr who co-starred with Hope Gable Tracy etc and was of course Mature’s Delilah. I hope Bruce gets round to doing a page on her when he’s worked his way through the musical stars that we’ve been at him about; and indeed she was such a sex icon that she would probably be great fodder for your own pictorials.

        2 In the late 50s a movie chain in the US did a special one-week season of MacMurray movies in what they claimed was “for old times sake.” He seemed to be one of Stanwyck’s most prolific co-stars. Bruce mentions him 4 times in Stanwyck’s co-star link column.

        1. Hedy is heading your way, hopefully finish the video by tonight. It doesn’t look like her most famous film will be at the top though. It might need a Parental Guidance rating, we shall see. 😉

          I will eventually have to add Fred M to my growing list of videos and I think we all know which film will come out on top, no no I don’t think it’s Son of Flubber.

  2. Hey Bob
    1. I think she was a little better than a B list star…I think she was the Jennifer Aniston of her time…why?…..(1) a very lovely lady (2) her looks overshadowed her acting…to a degree (3) they were both solid support for leading men…Paulette had Hope, Milland, Cooper, Chaplin and others…while Aniston has done the same thing for Wilson, Carrey, Rudd and others. (4) there stand alone “star” movies are few and far between….and not to successful.
    2. Only 6 movies seen? I figured your tally would be much much higher….that is 6 for you….8 for Steve…and 6 for me…..actually pretty weak tallies….where is Flora when we need her?…lol.
    3. I am sure her not doing the stunt was the final straw for DeMille…..it would be interesting to watch that relationship….start, grow and eventually end on a bad note.
    Thanks for the feedback on Paulette Goddard….greatly appreciated.

    1. 1 In Goddard’s Second Chorus Astaire activated an earlier version of his “young man ” persona as he and Meredith played college students which IMDB currently observes “stretches credibility as Astaire was 41 and Meredith 31 at the time of filming” It has been observed that the paradox was that the incongruity of playing characters much younger than he actually was had always been heightened in Fred’s case by the fact that his premature tendency to baldness actually made him look older than he really was even when he WAS young.

      2 However young actresses and others continued to extend licence to Fred and also in particular Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea even when they were in their fifties with for example a clergyman of Scott’s own real life age saying to the latter in one of his mid 50s westerns “It’s nice to see the young men in town coming to my services” as a smiling Scott emerged from the church holding hands with a ‘child bride’. In a TV sequence they ‘younged down’ Jack Benny
      by permitted to him play himself 30 years earlier with the trick of having him prance about a darkened arcade with invisible face and singing the Bing Crosby hit *** “Everywhere I go I’m just a Gigolo.” As the cliche goes “They don’t make em like that anymore!”

      ***Apparently when recording the song Bing who was very protective of his clean professional mage made sure that he actually distanced himself personally from the character of the youthful gigolo by singing the song in the third person as reported speech whereas a 1st person rendition would have had the circumspect Crosby confessing to being a young gigolo .

      1. Hey Bob….thanks for the information on Second Chorus….I agree losing his hair did not help Astaire…but his greatness and likability helped overcome his “age” issue.

        As for the age differences….just goes to prove that the “cliff” for me is far far away from 39….like it is for actresses….good trivia about Bing and the song…..thanks for sharing your wealth of movie knowledge.

  3. 1 In her heyday I saw Paulette as not in the league of Crawford or Davis but as definitely a top B list star, and because since those days i have usually seen her mentioned only in connection with Chaplin I welcome this new page profiling her quarter century movie career when as the above table illustrates she acted with some of the biggest of Hollywood names.

    2 Though it seems to have ended in acrimoney De Mille obviously liked her at first as I have noticed three of his films in the table above; but I have seen only 6 of her movies and my favourite was The Cat and the Canary which I’ve viewed many times. I can remember nothing from The Unconquered except one line that somebody uttered “Why have the Indians come for you?” It’s strange how the mind can retain mundane things for years and yet forget matters that were no doubt more important at the time.

    Best Wishes BOB

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