“Her magnetic approachability is enduring well over a century since her birth.”

In the galaxy of classic Hollywood stars, Claudette Colbert is often dwarfed by contemporaries. Though she appears on the American Film Institute list of 50 Greatest American Screen Legends, that constellation sparkles with the likes of Bette Davis, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and beyond, icons that shimmer as much as cultural constructs as they do merely film actresses. Perhaps Colbert’s welcoming versatility that spans across genres is the reason for lacking a signature role that takes on a life of its own. To be sure, there’s her magnificent, Oscar-winning work in It Happened One Night (1934), arguably the turn with which she is most associated, and for good reason. Colbert more or less perfected the talkies prototype of beautiful, independent and madcap runaway heiress in the film, giving a performance that still sparkles as that film approaches its centenary. For example, her scene one-upping co-star Clark Gable while hitchhiking, deftly utilizing her leg rather than merely an uplifted thumb, is montage-ready, pure cinema. The film though is best remembered as a comedic classic and breakthrough for Frank Capra perhaps, rather than merely for its wonderful, individual talents.

Colbert returned to a version of Ellen “Ellie” Andrews, the sophisticated socialite of It Happened One Night, in subsequent comedies. Most notable is Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938), a screwball romp by Ernst Lubitsch with an irresistible pairing against Gary Cooper. He’s a frequently married (as the title suggests) millionaire businessman with eyes on Colbert, the daughter of a down-on-his-luck marquis (the always splendid, yammering Edward Everett Horton). While aggressively contrived, somewhat mean-spirited and lacking that specific nuance of the director’s best, the fabled Lubitsch touch, Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife benefits from the wit of an uneven Charles Brackett-Billy Wilder screenplay, their first together. And it’s tough to resist Colbert’s character shoveling green onions down her throat just to counter the advances of Cooper’s insistent, onion-hating spouse, a blithe defense that plays against her chic persona. For any other actress this might be the type of moment parodied or given eternal life as a meme decades later; with Colbert, it’s a knowing dig at her meticulously self-cultivated image.

Mitchell Leisen’s wonderful, Brackett-Wilder penned Midnight (1939) and Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story (1942) later provided more complex and clever outlets for the exquisitely honed comedic dexterity that emerged over the Thirties as a counterpoint to the modern, alluring sexuality of Claudette Colbert’s earlier roles. That juxtaposition was a proven combination even at the dawn of the talkies, yet the actress was never merely the prototypical bombshell per se. An exception is her titillating role in Cecil B. DeMille’s pre-Code biblical epic, The Sign of the Cross (1932). As lusty Empress Poppaea, Colbert shocked audiences, particularly in a scene where her character bathes in asses’ milk. The content of the film was seen as so lurid that it allegedly led to the formation of the Catholic Legion of Decency. DeMille subsequently revisited the scintillating formula with Colbert in Cleopatra (1934). The results were less sensational as well as less memorable, although the star still slinks and reclines and slinks some more as the mythic Egyptian ruler; she is provocative but never foul or indecent, slipped into wonderfully naughty costumes and wrapped in glorious Art-Deco-on-the-Nile production design. There is a perpetual, respectable relatability to Colbert across performances and genres, an onscreen temperament that Paramount monetized in the first decade of her stardom.

The studio’s Torch Singer (1933) is emblematic of the Colbert dramatic persona, though this tearjerker is absurd in the trajectory of its lead. Sally Trent is an unwed woman who gives up her baby before charting an instantly successful nightclub career under a stage name. Later, she pivots into – of all things – duties as children’s radio show host, using the kiddie program to connect with the daughter she does not know. The premise is ludicrous if not unhinged, but Colbert stuns with beauty, grace and, above all, integrity. And that is key to her longevity: the actress almost always embodies characters tangible to audiences regardless of station, with just the perfect stipples of the extraordinary to make these characters aspirational.

Claudette Colbert played into this archetype consistently, for better or worse. By the end of the Thirties she was one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood and used this clout to leave Paramount. As a freelance artist Colbert was able to control her roles and image outside of studio interference, but she was reluctant to deviate from the screen identity curated over the preceding decade. She stuck with a tried-and-true assortment of light drama and warm comedies. So unlike, say, Barbara Stanwyck, a contemporary who was likewise versatile, Colbert never ventured heavily into film noir, a genre that was embraced by the public and later championed via film criticism. She never veered into late career exploitive horror, like Bette Davis or Joan Crawford, and missed the associated cult notoriety and camp sensibility. Colbert also never tackled series television, though she enjoyed multiple guest-starring roles into her final decades on screen. Even though she was European by birth, she lacked the exotic otherness of Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich, as well as the mystique – offscreen, she was private but largely scandal-free.

Her magnetic approachability is enduring well over a century since her birth, however. As featured on the Criterion Channel beginning this month, Starring Claudette Colbert follows the star across highlights in her career, beginning with the pre-Code, Dorothy Arzner melodrama Honor Among Lovers (1931) through the Douglas Sirk convent mystery Thunder on the Hill (1951). While decency grounds her performances, that gravity never stifles her twinkling, straightforward effortlessness. Even if she was seldom larger than life, Claudette Colbert could always illuminate the screen, earthbound but ethereal, regardless of genre.