Claudette Colbert

Winner of five Academy Awards, Frank Capra\'s celebrated romantic comedy stars movie legends Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. When Ellie Andrews, a millionaire\'s daughter, marries a man her father dislikes, the resulting family squabble sends the beautiful heiress into hiding. She travels across country by bus, a fugitive from high society. En route, she meets the man of her dreams: a sexy but brusque news correspondent who has just lost his job -- which unknown to Ellie, he hopes to recover by selling her story to his former boss. Together, Peter and Ellie have a series of hapless adventures and comic misunderstandings, leading them to the realization that they were made for each other.

The second screen adaptation of Fannie Hurst\'s emotionally charged novel (the first, made in 1934, starred Claudette Colbert). Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) and Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) are two widowed mothers, one white, the other black, who forge a close friendship when financial circumstances demand they share a small cold-water flat. Lora\'s financial lot improves when her acting career takes off, but life changes little for Annie, who continues to stay with Lora as her maid. Both women\'s daughters grow to resent their mothers; golden-haired Susie (Sandra Dee) becomes the spoiled, neglected daughter of a celebrated actress, while Annie\'s daughter, light-skinned Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), frustrated at the difficulties of being black in American society, continues to reject her mother\'s admonitions that she not try to pass for white. Turner centers an outstanding cast that garnered Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations for both Kohner and Moore. Director Douglas Sirk, in what was to be his final feature film, creates an intoxicating carnival of lush colors and dizzying, metallic surfaces. In his heightened rendering of the 1950s American dreamworld, with its widespread yearning for material success and submerged racial tensions, the most alluring realms reveal themselves as substanceless halls of mirrors.

Trailer for Imitation of Life. The lives of a widow and her housekeeper are united first in mutual need, then success and ultimately, in heartache in this Academy Award-nominated Best Picture. Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers are superb as Bea and Delilah, two women with young daughters who build a life and a fortune together selling Delilah's pancake recipe. But success doesn't save them from sorrow with the passing years. Delilah's light-skinned teenager rejects her mother and her race, while Bea must choose between the man she loves and the daughter who loves him, too. Now all of them will pay the price of love in this spellbinding classic, revered as one of the all-time Hollywood tear-jerkers, from collaborators William Hurlbut and Preston Sturges.

Trailer for The Palm Beach Story. The captivating Claudette Colbert stars as the frustrated wife of struggling engineer Joel McCrea. In a seemingly amicable agreement, Colbert hops a train to Palm Beach where divorces come easy. Desperate to escape a group of obnoxious millionaires on the train to Florida, Colbert hides out in a sleeping car where she meets, unbeknownst to her, one of the world's richest men (Rudy Vallee) who is relentless in his attempt to romance her. Upon their arrival in Palm Beach, Colbert is met by her husband who has come to claim her back only to find that Vallee's man-crazy sister (Mary Astor) is after him! The foursome's story unfolds through intensely humorous dialogue, flirtatious situations and a splendid soundtrack.