Carroll Baker

Carroll Baker
Baker in 1964
Born	(1931-05-28) May 28, 1931 (age 85) Johnstown, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1952–2003
Height	5 ft 5 in (1.65 m)
Spouse(s)	Louie Ritter (m. 1953–53) Jack Garfein (m. 1955–69) Donald Burton (m. 1978; d. 2007)
Children	Blanche Baker Herschel Garfein
Signature

Carroll Baker (born May 28, 1931) is a former American film, stage, and television actress. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Baker's range of roles from naive to brash and flamboyant women established her as both a serious dramatic actress and a pin-up. While performing on Broadway in 1954, she was recruited by director Elia Kazan to play the lead in the film of Tennessee Williams's Baby Doll (1956). Her role in the film as a sexually-repressed Southern bride lent Baker overnight notoriety and earned her BAFTA and Academy Award nominations for Best Actress, as well as a Golden Globe award for Most Promising Newcomer that year.

Other early roles included Giant (1956) and But Not for Me (1959), as well as westerns such as The Big Country (1958), How the West Was Won (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). In the mid-1960s, Baker became a sex symbol for her roles in The Carpetbaggers (1964), Sylvia (1965), and Harlow (1965). She relocated to Italy in 1966 amidst a legal battle over her contract with Paramount Pictures, and spent the following ten years starring in hard-edged horror and giallo thrillers, including Umberto Lenzi's Paranoia (1969) and Knife of Ice (1972), before re-emerging for American audiences as a character actress in Andy Warhol's film Bad (1977).