Background
BAKER, Carroll was born on May 28, 1931 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, United States. Daughter of William W. Baker and Virginia Duffy.
BAKER, Carroll was born on May 28, 1931 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, United States. Daughter of William W. Baker and Virginia Duffy.
She studied at St. Petersburg Jr. College in Florida.
She was a nightclub dancer and a pupil at the Actors’ Studio. She had a tiny part in Easy to Love (53, Charles Walters) but came to real notice brilliantly served by Tennessee Williams, Elia Kazan, Karl Malden, and Eli Wal- laeh so that she seemed genuinely overripe and heedlessly erotic, in Baby Doll (56)—sucking her thumb as if vaguely mindful of the sucked toe in Bunuel’s L'Age d'Oe In the same year, she was reassessed by George Stevens as a dull little blonde in Giant.
The Big Country (58, William Wyler) had her pouting throughout, while The Miracle (59, Irving Rapper) was fatuous. She strove in the next few years to dignify her blonde voluptuousness, sometimes taking it to a point of exaggeration. She is terribly serious in Something Wild (62, directed by her then husband Jack Garfein); but perfectly exploited bv Seth Holt as the disruptive element at Station Six Sahara (63).
Her finest hour came for Joseph Levine in a prurient series that caught her flamboyant earnestness: The Carpetbaggers (64, Edward Dmytryk); Harlow (65, Gordon Douglas); andSylvia (65, Douglas). Since then, she has been unobtrusive in Cheyenne Autumn (64, John Ford), as Veronica in The Greatest Story Ever Told (65, Stevens), in Mister Moses (65, Ronald Neame); and otherwise given up to lurid concoctions, two of which claim to be called The Sweet Body of Deborah (68, Romolo Guerrieri) and Orgasmo (68, Umberto Lenzi). She was also in Captain Apache (71, Alexander Singer); a witch in Baba Yaga (73, Corrado Farina); The Virgin Wife (76, Franco Martinelli); Andy Warhol’s Bad (76, Jed Johnson); Confessions of a Frustrated Housewife (76, Andrea Bianchi); Zerschossene Traume (77, Peter Petzak); The W atcher in the Woods (81, John Hough); Red Monarch (83, Jack Gold); the mama to Bud Cort’s Freud in The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud (S3, Danford B. Greene); the mom to Dorothy Stratten in Star 80 (83, Bob Fosse); Hitler’s S.S’.. Portrait in Evil (85, Jim Goddard); Native Son (86, Jerrold Freedman); On Fire (87, Robert Greenwald); as Jack Nicholson’s wife in Ironweed (87, Hector Babenco); Kindergarten Cop (90, Ivan Reitman); and Blonde Fist (91, Frank Clarke).
Most of her work nowadays is obscure, or for television, but she has been in Judgment Day: The John List Ston/ (93, Bobby Roth); Men Don’t Tell (93, Harry Winer); A Kiss to Dir For (93, Leon Ichaso); Gipsy Angel (94, Al Fata); Im Sog des Bozen (95, Nikolai Mullerschon); Dalva (96, Ken Cameron); Noi~th Shore Fish (96, Steve Zueker- man); Just Your Luck (96, Gan7 Auerbach); Skeletons (96, David DeCoteau); The Game (97, David Fincher); Heart Full of Rain (97, Roger Young); Rag and Bone (97, Robert Lieberman); Nowhere to Go (98, [ohn Caire); Another Woman’s Husband (00, Noel Nosseck).
Academy, of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Her first husband was Jack Garfein 1955 (divorced). She was married for the second time to Donald Burton in 1982.