Anne Baxter

Anne Baxter (May 7, 1923 – December 12, 1985) was an American actress who worked across film, stage, and television. Her performance as Sophie MacDonald in *The Razor’s Edge* (1946) earned her both the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress, and she later received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for playing the title role in *All About Eve* (1950). Over her career, she also won seven Photoplay Awards and two Laurel Awards, and was nominated for an Emmy.

Baxter was born in Michigan City, Indiana, to Catherine Dorothy Wright—whose father was architect Frank Lloyd Wright—and Kenneth Stuart Baxter, an executive at Seagram. She first acted in a school play at age five, and when she was six her family moved to New York. Raised in Westchester County, she attended The Brearley School. At ten, after seeing a Broadway play starring Helen Hayes, she told her family she wanted to be an actress. By thirteen, she had appeared on Broadway in *Seen but Not Heard* and was studying acting with Maria Ouspenskaya. In 1939, she was cast as Katharine Hepburn’s younger sister in *The Philadelphia Story*, but Hepburn disliked her style and Baxter was replaced during the pre-Broadway run. Instead of quitting, she headed to Hollywood.

At sixteen, Baxter screen-tested for the role of Mrs. DeWinter in *Rebecca*. Director Alfred Hitchcock thought she was too young, but the test led to offers from MGM and 20th Century Fox. She signed with Fox for a higher salary. Her first film, *20 Mule Team* (1940), was a loan-out to MGM, where she was billed fourth. She then worked with John Barrymore in *The Great Profile* (1940) and played the ingénue in Jack Benny’s *Charley’s Aunt* (1941). She received star billing in *Swamp Water* (1941) and *The Pied Piper* (1942), the latter nominated for Best Picture. Loaned to RKO, she appeared in Orson Welles’s *The Magnificent Ambersons* (1942). She was Tyrone Power’s leading lady in *Crash Dive* (1943), her first Technicolor film, and played a French maid in Billy Wilder’s *Five Graves to Cairo* (1943). During World War II, she became a popular star in dramas, getting top billing in *The North Star* (1943), *The Sullivans* (1944), *The Eve of St. Mark* (1944), and *Sunday Dinner for a Soldier* (1944), which co-starred her future husband John Hodiak. She later said she was getting nearly as much mail as Betty Grable, calling herself “o