Carroll Baker

Carroll Baker (born May 28, 1931) is an American actress. After studying under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, Baker began performing on Broadway in 1954. From there, she was recruited by director Elia Kazan to play the lead in the adaptation of two Tennessee Williams plays into the film Baby Doll in 1956. Her role in the film as a coquettish but sexually naïve Southern bride earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Baker had other early film roles in Giant (1956) and the romantic comedy But Not for Me (1959). In 1961, she appeared in the controversial independent film Something Wild, directed by her then husband Jack Garfein, playing a traumatized rape victim. She went on to star in several critically acclaimed Westerns in the 1950s and 1960s such as The Big Country (1958), How the West Was Won (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). In the mid-1960s, as a contract player for Paramount Pictures, Baker became a sex symbol after appearing as a hedonistic widow in The Carpetbaggers (1964). The film's producer, Joseph E. Levine, cast her in the potboiler Sylvia before giving her the role of Jean Harlow in the biopic Harlow (1965). Despite significant prepublicity, Harlow was a critical failure, and Baker relocated to Italy in 1966 amid a legal dispute over her contract with Paramount and Levine's overseeing of her career. In Europe, she spent the next 10 years starring in hard-edged giallo and horror films, including Romolo Guerrieri's The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968), a series of four films with Umberto Lenzi beginning with Orgasmo (1969) and ending with Knife of Ice (1972), and Corrado Farina's Baba Yaga (1973). She re-emerged for American audiences as a character actress in the Andy Warhol-produced dark comedy Bad (1977).