Even though husband, Charlie Chaplin, helped boost Paulette's early career, she found success on her own in such pictures as Dramatic School (1938), The Women and The Cat and the Canary (both 1939). Never an actress of great range, Goddard had an earthy, intelligent quality-and a natural vivacity that made her a screen favorite throughout the 1940s in The Great Dictator (opposite Chaplin again), Second Chorus (dancing with Fred Astaire and playing opposite future husband Burgess Meredith), and, reunited with Cat costar Bob Hope, The Ghost Breakers (all 1940), Hold Back the Dawn, Nothing but the Truth (both 1941), Reap the Wild Wind, The Lady Has Plans (both 1942), The Crystal Ball (1943), Standing Room Only (1944), Kitty (1945, as an 18th-century guttersnipe transformed into a lady, one of her best star vehicles), The Diary of a Chambermaid (1946, with Meredith), Unconquered (1947), An Ideal Husband (1948), and the underrated Bride of Vengeance (1949).
Goddard received a 1943 Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her work as one of the Pacific-stationed WW2 nurses in So Proudly We Hail!. Her 1950s films-including Babes in Bagdad (1952) and Sins of Jezebel (1953)-were forgettable and she retired from the screen, although she made a brief 1964 comeback as Claudia Cardinale's mother in the Italian-French coproduction A Time of Indifference. Divorced from Chaplin in 1942, she was later married to actor Burgess Meredith, and still later to novelist Erich Maria Remarque. An extremely wealthy woman, toward the end of her life she gave generous endowments to the New York University School of the Arts. Paulette died from heart failure On April 23, 1990 in Ronco, Switzerland at the age of 78.
Copyright © 1994 Leonard Maltin, used by arrangement with Signet, a division of Penguin Putnam, Inc.
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