Oscar Profile#191: Anne Baxter

Born May 7, 1923 in Michigan City, Indiana but raised in New York City, Anne Baxter was the daughter of a Seagrams Distillery executive and his wife, the daughter of world-renown architect Frank Lloyd Wright. She was determined to become an actress after seeing Helen Hayes on stage in Mary of Scotland when she was 10. By 13 she was receiving critical huzzahs for her Broadway debut in Seen But Not Heard. At 16 she tested for the role of the second Mrs. DeWinter in Rebecca but lost out to Joan Fontaine because Alfred Hitchcock considered her too young for the role. She immediately signed a seven year contract with 20th Century-Fox and made her film debut in 1940’s 20 Mule Team.

Baxter’s impressive performances in The Great Profile; Charley’s Aunt; Swamp Water and The Pied Piper caught the attention of Orson Welles who cast her in 1942’s The Magnificent Ambersons from which her career really took off.

In such hits as Crash Dive; Five Graves to Cairo; The North Star; The Fighting Sullivans and Angel on My Shoulder, Baxter’s career hit another high point with her performance in 1946’s The Razor’s Edge for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar. That same year she married first husband John Hodiak with whom she had a daughter in 1951.

Baxter’s post-Oscar roles were not as good as those that had come before, but in 1950 she was given a major career break when cast in the title role in All About Eve because of her resemblance to the film’s star, Claudette Colbert. When Colbert was forced to withdraw because of back problems, Baxter stayed on as the ingénue who makes life hell for Bette Davis instead of Colbert. The result was a Best Actress nomination for both actresses in the year’s Oscar winning Best Picture.

Post Eve Baxter was seen to good advantage in O. Henry’s Full House; I Confess; The Blue Gardenia and Carnival Story before securing another career high role in 1956’s The Ten Commandments.

Divorced from Hodiak in 1953, she married second husband Randolph Galt in 1960 with whom she had two more daughters in 1962 and 1963. They were divorced in 1969. Mostly on TV throughout her marriage to Galt, she did have a high profile role in 1962’s Walk on the Wild Side.

Baxter achieved new prominence in the early 1970s when she replaced Lauren Bacall in her Tony Award-winning role in Broadway’s Applause, the musical version of All About Eve, this time in the role Bette Davis played in the film. More TV work followed with an occasional film role through the early 1980s. She married for a third time in 1977, but her husband died suddenly a few months later.

In 1983 Baxter replaced Davis in the TV series Hotel after Davis’ stroke. The series ran through 1988, Baxter having completed several unaired episodes before her sudden death in December, 1985 which were aired in early 1986.

Suffering a brain aneurism while hailing a cab on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue, the actress was taken to a hospital where she died eight days later. Anne Baxter was 62.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (1942), directed by Orson Welles

Orson Welles’ film of Booth Tarkington 1919 Pulitzer Prize winner was famously mangled by RKO when the studio took control of the film while Welles was busy filming the documentary It’s All True in South America. How much, if any of Baxter’s scenes were cut, is unclear. Third billed in the film behind Joseph Cotton and Dolores Costello and ahead of Tim Holt and Agnes Moorehead, her portrayal of Joseph Cotten’s daughter was well received by the critics though time has been kinder to the other four principals, all of whose performances are considered one of the high points of their careers.

THE RAZOR’S EDGE (1946), directed by Edmund Goulding

Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney were the stars of this first and best version of W. Somerset Maugham’s novel about the search for enlightenment but fourth and fifth billed Baxter and Clifton Webb walked off with the film’s acting honors which included an Oscar nomination for Webb as Tierney’s supercilious uncle and an Oscar for Baxter as Tierney’s tragic friend who turns to the bottle after her husand and child are killed in an auto accident.

Baxter has called her hospital scene in the film the best acting she ever did.

ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Hired for the film’s second lead because of her resemblance to the film’s intended lead, Claudette Colbert, Baxter stayed on after Colbert head to withdraw due to back trouble and marvelously crafted her performance to new lead Bette Davis’ altogether different performance.

Baxter’s ambitious ingénue Eve Harrington maneuvers her way into the life of Broadway legend Margo Channing (Davis) and within the course of a year has managed to seduce Davis’ director and fiancée (Gary Merrill); Channing’s best friend (Celeste Holm)’s playwright husband (Hugh Marlowe) and a venomous critic (George Sanders) and become a star in her own right.

Some Oscar watchers accused Baxter of taking a leaf out of Eve’s book by insisting that she be promoted for Best Actress Oscar consideration instead of Best Supporting Actress, thus taking votes away from Davis in her unfulfilled quest for a third Oscar. Both actresses were among the films fourteen nominations, but not among the film’s six wins.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (1956), directed by Cecil B. DeMille

Baxter had a field day playing Nefretiri, the Egyptian throne princess torn between her love of Moses (Charlton Heston) and her marriage to Rameses (Yul Brynner) in DeMille’s epic filmed over a period of several years.

Saddled with lines like “Oh, Moses, Moses, why of all men did I fall in love with a prince of fools?” and her rebuke to Rameses, “Did you think my kiss was a promise of what you’ll have. No, my pompous one., it wasn’t her greatest dramatic role but she more than held her own with Heston and Brynner at their best. A box office phenomenon, it kept her in the spotlight for years.

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE (1962), directed by Edward Dmytryk

Although Baxter’s career lasted until death, her later prominence was more on television and in the theatre than it was on film, but she had one last major triumph as the sympathetic Mexican diner owner who gives solace and employment to Laurence Harvey away from the brothel where he finds lost love Capucine under the thumb of lesbian madam Barbara Stanwyck. The film also stars Jane Fonda; Joanna Moore and Juanita Moore. All of the film’s principal players had done or will do better things on screen.

Audiences went to see it in droves, but only Baxter emerged unscathed by the critics.