Carroll Baker (born May 28, 1931) is a retired American actress. After studying under Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, Baker began performing on Broadway in 1954. From there, she was recruited by director Elia Kazan to play the lead in the adaptation of two Tennessee Williams plays into the film Baby Doll in 1956. Her role in the film as a coquettish but sexually naïve Southern bride earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress.
Baker had other early film roles in Giant (1956) and the romantic comedy But Not for Me (1959). In 1961, she appeared in the controversial independent film Something Wild, directed by her then-husband Jack Garfein, playing a traumatized rape victim. She went on to star in several critically acclaimed Westerns in the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Big Country (1958), How the West Was Won (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964).
In the mid-1960s, as a contract player for Paramount Pictures, Baker became a sex symbol after appearing as a hedonistic widow in The Carpetbaggers (1964). The film's producer, Joseph E. Levine, cast her in Sylvia before giving her the role of Jean Harlow in the biopic Harlow (1965). Despite significant prepublicity, Harlow was a critical failure, and Baker relocated to Italy in 1966 amid a legal dispute over her contract with Paramount and Levine's overseeing of her career. In Europe, she spent the next 10 years starring in hard-edged giallo and horror films, including Romolo Guerrieri's The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968), a series of four films with Umberto Lenzi beginning with Orgasmo (1969) and ending with Knife of Ice (1972), and Corrado Farina's Baba Yaga (1973). She re-emerged for American audiences as a character actress in the Andy Warhol–produced dark comedy Bad (1977).
Baker appeared in supporting roles in several acclaimed dramas in the 1980s, including the true-crime drama Star 80 (1983) as the mother of murder victim Dorothy Stratten, and the racial drama Native Son (1986), based on the novel by Richard Wright. In 1987, she had a supporting part in Ironweed (1987). Through the 1990s, Baker had guest roles in several television series, such as Murder, She Wrote; L.A. Law, and Roswell. She also had supporting parts in several big-budget films, such as Kindergarten Cop (1990) and the David Fincher–directed thriller The Game (1997). She formally retired from acting in 2003. In addition to acting, Baker is also the author of two autobiographies and two novels.
Baker was born and raised in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, into a Catholic family, the daughter of Edith Gertrude (née Duffy) and William Watson Baker, a traveling salesman. Baker is of Irish and Polish descent, which has given rise to a rumor that her birth name was Karolina Piekarski, though this currently cannot be substantiated by known records. Her parents separated when she was eight years old, and she moved with her mother and younger sister, Virginia, to Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania. According to Baker, her mother struggled as a single parent, and the family was poor for much of her upbringing.
Baker attended Greensburg High School (now known as Greensburg Salem) in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, where she was a debate team member and active in the marching band and school musicals. At 18, she moved with her family to St. Petersburg, Florida, where she attended St. Petersburg Junior College (now St. Petersburg College). After her first year in college, she began working as a magician's assistant on the vaudeville circuit and joined a dance company, working as a professional dancer. In 1949, Baker won the title of Miss Florida Fruits and Vegetables. In 1951, Baker moved to New York City, where she rented a dirt-floor basement apartment in Queens. She worked as a nightclub dancer and also had stints as a chorus girl in traveling vaudeville shows, which took her to Windsor, Detroit, and New Jersey.
Baker studied acting at HB Studio. In 1952, she enrolled at the Actors Studio and studied under Lee Strasberg. There, she was a classmate of Mike Nichols, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, Ben Gazzara, and Marilyn Monroe. Baker had a fling with Gazzara at that time, of which she said “I had a very strict upbringing; my mother was raised by nuns. I was a faithful wife until my divorce – then I went crazy. I was famous, people came up to me and yes, I enjoyed sex so much!". She also became a close friend of James Dean for the rest of his life.
After appearing in television commercials for Winston cigarettes and Coca-Cola, Baker was featured in an episode of Monodrama Theater performing a monodramatic piece, which was broadcast in 1952 on the DuMont Network. The following year, she made her film debut with a small, walk-on part in the musical Easy to Love (1953). This led to her landing roles in two Broadway productions: Roger MacDougall's Escapade in the fall of 1953, and Robert Anderson's All Summer Long, opposite Ed Begley, which ran from September to mid-November 1954. In 1955, she screen tested and auditioned for the lead role in Picnic, but lost the part to Kim Novak. She was also considered for the lead in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) after James Dean recommended her for the part to director Nicholas Ray, which she turned down.
Baker's first major screen role was the supporting part of Luz Benedict II in Giant (1956), opposite Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean, in his final role. According to Baker, she had been offered numerous leading parts in feature films before that point, but chose to debut in a supporting role in Giant because she was "insecure" and "wanted to start out a little less 'profile'." Giant was largely filmed in the small town of Marfa, Texas, in 1955; Baker recalled her experience on set, saying that James Dean and she were both enamored of Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor while filming.
Simultaneously, Baker was cast as the title character in Elia Kazan's Baby Doll (1956), a role initially intended for Marilyn Monroe. Tennessee Williams, who had written and developed the screenplay based on two of his one-act plays, wanted Baker to play the part after seeing her perform a scene from his script at the Actors Studio; likewise, Kazan had been impressed by her performance in All Summer Long on Broadway the year prior. Shot in Benoit, Mississippi, directly after Baker had completed Giant, her role in the film as a sexually repressed teenaged bride to a failed middle-aged cotton gin owner brought Baker overnight fame and a level of notoriety even before the film's release. During shooting, Baker was prohibited from eating around photographers in order to get better photos, bringing her weight down to just 110 pounds. In the fall of 1956, artist Robert Everheart, under contract with Warner Bros., constructed a 135-foot-tall (41 m) billboard in Times Square promoting the film, depicting the now-iconic image of a scantily clad Baker lying in a crib sucking her thumb. The controversial advertising campaign for the film caused a pre-emptive backlash from religious groups, and on December 16, 1956, Cardinal Francis Spellman of St. Patrick's Cathedral denounced the film and advised his parish against seeing it. A formal condemnation by the Roman Catholic National Legion of Decency ensued, which considered it "grievously offensive to Christian and traditional standards of morality and decency".
In spite of this, Baby Doll opened to strong box-office receipts, grossing $51,232 in its first week at the Victoria Theater. In support of Baker, Marilyn Monroe appeared at the film's premiere, working as an usherette to help bolster ticket sales, the proceeds of which were donated to the Actors Studio. Baker received immense critical praise for her performance. Variety said that her performance "captures all the animal charm, the naivete, the vanity, contempt and rising passion of Baby Doll", while Bosley Crowther of The New York Times praised Baker's ability to exhibit "a piteously flimsy little twist of juvenile greed, inhibitions, physical yearnings, common crudities and conceits". Baby Doll established Baker as an A-list actress and would remain the film for which she is best remembered. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance, a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, and won a Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer, which she shared with Jayne Mansfield and Natalie Wood. The performance also earned her a Film Achievement Award from Look, as well as the title "Woman of the Year" in 1957 from Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Club. She appeared on the cover of Life Magazine in June 1956.