Background
Goddard, Paulette was born on June 3, 1915 in Whitestone, New York, United States.
Goddard, Paulette was born on June 3, 1915 in Whitestone, New York, United States.
Studied at public schools.
Her success in Modern Times almost won her the part of Scarlett O’Hara, but Selznick used her in The Young in Heart (38, Richard Wallace); she was also in The Women (39, Cukor)—before he sold her to Paramount. She duly became one of the leading ladies of that studio; opposite Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary (39, Elliott Nugent) and The Ghost Breakers (40, George Marshall); her first hoyden, in De Mille's North West Mounted Police (40). She also appeared in Chaplins The Great Dictator (40).
Throughout the war years, she flourished at Paramount yet she never quite carried a film or laid hands on unequivocal stardom: Second Chorus (41, H. C. Potter), with Fred Astaire and Burgess Meredith; Hold Back the Dawn (41, Mitchell Leisen); Nothing But the Truth (41, Nugent); Reap the Wild Wind (42, De Mille); The Forest Rangers (42, Marshall); The Crystal Ball (43, Nugent); So Proudly We Hail (43. Mark Sandrich); Standing Room Only (44, Sidney Lanfield); I Love a Soldier (44, Sandrieh); Nitty (45, Leisen), a vehicle that didn’t really own the road.
By now, she had married Burgess Meredith, and she appeared delightfully with him in Renoirs The Diary of a Chambermaid (46). Next, she was in Suddenly It's Spring (47, Leisen), a slave girl in De Mille’s Unconquered (47), and then Mrs. Cheveley in Alexander Korda’s An Ideal Husband(48).
Not many actresses could have played those four films in a row so well, and even she couldn’t quite manage the last, although she worked hard to “look like a woman with a past.” Her career began to decline, but never forsook the adventurous: Hazard (48, Marshall); On Our Merry Way (48, King Vidor and Lesley Fenton); as Lucretia Borgia in Bride of Vengeance (49, Leisen); and in the all-white Anna Lucasta (49, Irving Rapper). After The Torch (50, Emilio Fernandez) she made yet another curiosity, Edgar G. Ulmer’s Babes in Bagdad (52). The rest is unworthy: Vice Squad (53, Arnold Laven); The Sins of Jezebel (53, Reginald Le Borg); The Charge of the Lancers (54, William Castle); and The Stranger Came Home (54, Terence Fisher). In 1958, she married Erich Maria Remarque and retired. But she made one more film, in Italy, Gli Indifferenti (64, Francesco Maselli), and she played a murdered movie star on TV in The Snoop Sisters (72, Leonard Stern).
Paulette Goddard was replete with alimony from a first broken marriage, barely blooded in movies, an ex-Goldwyn girl, and now with Hal Roach. She met Charlie Chaplin, contributed herself and her money to Modern Times (36), and was his wife from 1933 to 1942. Of all Chaplin’s leading ladies she is the most lively and appealing, as well as the one who seems to have pushed him near a real warmth for women. At her prime she was delectably gay and vivacious—she had the nickname “Sugar”—with an underlying strength and stubbornness that was brought out in her De Mille films.
Married Edgar James; married Charles Chaplin. Married Burgess Meredith, June 21, 1944 (divorced). Married Erich Maria Remarque, February 25, 1958 (deceased 1971).