Carroll Baker

Carroll Baker

Carroll Baker (born May 28, 1931) is a retired American actress of film, stage, and television. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Baker's range of roles from young ingénues to brash and flamboyant women established her as both a pin-up and serious dramatic actress. After studying under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, Baker began performing on Broadway in 1954. From there she was recruited by director Elia Kazan to play the lead in the adaptation of two Tennessee Williams plays into the film Baby Doll in 1956. Her role in the film as a coquettish but sexually naïve Southern bride earned her BAFTA and Oscar nominations for Best Actress, as well as a Golden Globe award for Most Promising Newcomer that year. Her other early film roles included George Stevens' Giant (1956), playing the love interest of James Dean, and in the romantic comedy But Not for Me (1959). In 1961, Baker appeared in the controversial independent film Something Wild, directed by her then-husband Jack Garfein, playing a traumatized rape victim. She went on to star in several critically acclaimed Westerns in the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Big Country (1958), How the West Was Won (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

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