Early Life
Émilie Chauchoin was born in Saint-Mandé, Seine, France, to Georges Claude, a banker, and Jeanne Marie Loew Chauchoin. Despite being christened "Emilie", she was called "Lily" as nickname because she had a cousin, the daughter of her mother's sister, of the same name. After some financial reversals, her family emigrated to New York City in 1911. Her mother was born in Channel Islands and was raised in there. Her mother was a fluent English speaker so Colbert could quickly learn English.
Colbert studied at Washington Irving High School where her speech teacher, Alice Rossetter, encouraged her to audition for a play she had written. Colbert made her stage debut at the Provincetown Playhouse in The Widow's Veil at the age of 15.
She attended the Art Students League of New York, intending to become a fashion designer, but appeared on the Broadway stage in a small role in The Wild Westcotts (1923). She had been using the name Claudette instead of nickname Lily since high school, and for her stage name she added her maternal grandmother's maiden name, Colbert.
Read more about this topic: Claudette Colbert
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“I found my brother’s body at the bottom there, where they had thrown it away on the rocks, by the river. Like an old, dirty rag nobody wants. He was dead. And I felt I had killed him. I turned back to give myself up.... Because if a man’s life can be lived so long and come out this way, like rubbish, then something was horrible, and had to be ended one way or another. And I decided to help.”
—Abraham Polonsky (b. 1910)