Celeste Holm

The Contract She Almost Didn't Sign

Celeste Holm arrived in Hollywood with a condition that today looks like professional suicide. She demanded that her contract with 20th Century Fox not be exclusive so she could return to the stage whenever she wanted. Darryl F. Zanuck agreed because he knew he had on his hands the actress who had just blown up Broadway with Oklahoma! in 1943.

Her film debut was no experiment. In 1946 she shot Three Little Girls in Blue, and just a year later she had an Oscar on the shelf at home. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1948 for her role in Gentleman's Agreement, a film that tackled antisemitism when no one in the industry wanted to touch the subject.

And the gamble paid off.

But Holm didn't fit the mold of the submissive stars of the era. She had a European education and a wit she sharpened in every interview. For her, the camera was just a prop, and the stage was where talent was truly measured.

Eve's Shadow and Her Return to the Stage

In 1950, she played Karen Richards in All About Eve. It is the role for which much of the world remembers her. She made her character the moral compass in a nest of vipers while sharing the screen with Bette Davis. She earned another Oscar nomination, but the studio atmosphere was starting to wear her down.

In 1951, she decided to break her million-dollar contract with Fox. She preferred earning less money in New York than continuing to play the clever friend of the lead in films that didn't interest her. So she returned to Broadway to star in Affairs of State and prove that her name could sell tickets without the spotlight of Los Angeles.

She never regretted that escape.

Over the following decades she moved between television and the stage with astonishing agility. In 1965 she played the stepmother in the musical version of Cinderella by Rodgers and Hammerstein. It was a massive ratings hit that placed her in the minds of a new generation of viewers who had not seen her films from the 1940s.

An Ending on Fifth Avenue

Her private life was as intense as her work schedule. She married five times, and her last union caused a family rift that ended up in Manhattan courts. In 2004, she married Frank Basile, an opera singer forty-six years younger than she was, which sparked a legal battle over her estate that lasted nearly a decade.

Despite the lawsuits and the loss of much of her fortune, she kept working until her physical strength gave out. In 2005 she appeared in the film Alchemy and still had the energy to shoot Driving Me Crazy in 2012.

She died in her Central Park West apartment at age 95.

The death certificate issued in July 2012 confirmed that the cause of death was an acute myocardial infarction resulting from dehydration after a failure in the building's air conditioning system.