Paulette Goddard

Sources variously cite her year of birth as 1911 and 1914, and the place as Whitestone Landing, New York, USA. However, municipal employees in Ronco, Switzerland, where she died, gave her birth year of record as 1905.

Paulette Goddard was a child model who debuted in "The Ziegfeld Follies" at the age of 13. She gained fame with the show as the girl on the crescent moon, and was married to a wealthy man by the time she was 16. After her divorce she went to Hollywood in 1931, where she appeared in small roles in pictures for a number of studios. A stunning natural beauty, Paulette could mesmerize any man she met, a fact she was well aware of.

One of her bigger roles in that period was as a blond "Goldwyn Girl" in the Eddie Cantor film The Kid from Spain (1932).

In 1932 she met Charles Chaplin, and they soon became an item around town.

He cast her in Modern Times (1936), which was a big hit, but her movie career was not going anywhere because of her relationship with Chaplin.

They were secretly married in 1936, but the marriage failed and they were separated by 1940.

It was her role as Miriam Aarons in The Women (1939), however, that got her a contract with Paramount.

Paulette was one of the many actresses tested for the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939), but she lost the part to Vivien Leigh and instead appeared with Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary (1939), a good film but hardly in the same league as GWTW.

The 1940s were Paulette's busiest period.

She worked with Chaplin in The Great Dictator (1940), Cecil B.

Her star faded in the late 1940s, however, and she was dropped by Paramount in 1949.

DeMille in Reap the Wild Wind (1942) and Burgess Meredith in The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946).

She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in So Proudly We Hail! (1943).

She suffered a miscarriage in October 1944 while married to Burgess Meredith.

Because she would not do a dangerous stunt in Unconquered (1947), Cecil B. DeMille rejected her acceptance of a key role in Greatest Show On Earth (1952) and cast Gloria Grahame, who was eight years younger, and agreed to do the stunt, instead.

In 1948, Alexander Korda planned a new version of "Carmen" to star Goddard but abandoned those plans when Columbia mounted their own version to star Rita Hayworth.

After a couple of "B" movies, she left films and went to live in Europe as a wealthy expatriate; she married German novelist Erich Maria Remarque in the late 1950s.

Although they lived in separate apartments in their 57th Street Manhattan apartment building, Goddard and her husband, Erich Maria Remarque, dined together every night.

Goddard never had any children, but she became a stepmother to Charles Chaplin's two sons, Charles Chaplin Jr.. and Sydney Chaplin, while she and Charlie were married. In his memoirs, "My Father Charlie Chaplin," from 1960, Charles Jr. describes her as a lovely, caring and intelligent woman throughout the book.

All four of her husbands were writers of screenplays. James wrote two before they were married. Chaplin wrote (or contributed to) eighty-nine, before, during, and after their marriage. Meredith wrote five, before and during their marriage. And Remarque, who was primarily known (and quite famously) as a writer/novelist, wrote screenplays (almost all were adaptations of his own books) before and during their marriage, died in 1970, although his books continue to be adapted for movies regularly (as of 2020).

Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives," Volume Two, 1986-1990, pages 331-333. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1999.

Goddard underwent invasive treatment for breast cancer in 1975, successfully by all accounts. On April 23, 1990, she died from heart failure while under respiratory support due to emphysema, aged 79, at her home in Ronco, Switzerland. She is buried in Ronco Village Cemetery, next to last husband Erich Maria Remarque (who had died twenty years earlier) and her mother.

Is portrayed by Diane Lane in Chaplin (1992) and by Gwen Humble in The Scarlett O'Hara War (1980).