Elia Kazan brought the actress to light, when he would cast Carroll Baker in the screen adaptation of the transfixing Tennessee Williams tale Baby Doll in 1956 while she was all but a babe in the Broadway woods, only just coming into her own as a budding theater actress, albeit the world would catch wind of her smoldering somethingness - this flaxen-haired filly and voila, she would never have to sing for her supper again. Born under the Gemini sun in 1931 in Cambria County, Pennsylvania to a family of humble means, Baker was no neophyte to the art of pulling oneself up from the bootstraps. In her elementary school years, she took to the stage, performing in many a musical and was soon enlisted with the school marching band. And she could hoof with the best of them too, and shuffled off, was she, all the way to Vaudeville.
Carroll Baker took that old familiar chestnut of a path, otherwise known as the long way home, and found herself living in a cramped bedsit in one of the boroughs of New York City, a skin of the teeth survivor, she shimmied her way into a chorus line or two before in 1952 joining the ranks of Dean and Monroe, becoming a student of Lee Strasberg's infamous Acting Studio. And like some other famous blonde bombshell belied by their physical appeals, the dame could act, really, really act. There was no such schmoozing a martinet like Mister Kazan after all.
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| There's just something about Something Wild |
In 1961, Baker proved once again how very worthy her salt was with her portrayal of Mary Ann Robinson in Something Wild, Jack Garfein's (Baker's then husband) harsh lit story of rape and its aftermath; this film boasted one of the most uncompromising interpretations of the subject and all at a time when the subject itself was veritably verboten.
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| Baker never butchered her gialli roles - from A Quiet Place to Kill (1970) |
The actress's resume was ever-so varied, Baker vacillated from one genre to the next and was ultimately cast in a string of giallo films, not long before she went into self-imposed exile after becoming disillusioned by the whole Hollywood system and decided to do her disappearing act, setting up shop abroad in Europe, beginning with Umberto Lenzi's atmospheric So Sweet...So Perverse in 1969.
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| She doesn't wanna grow up, she's a toys-R-us kid. From Baby Doll (1956) |
Baker, at age 89 and after more than a decade on hiatus, after starring in the short-lived dramatic televisual series The Lyon's Den in 2003, has resurfaced and is cast vis a vis daughter Blanche Baker in the upcoming Summer of Ivy, soon to be released.