Carroll Baker is a former American film, stage, and television actress. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Baker’s range of roles from naive ingenues to brash and flamboyant women established her as both a serious dramatic actress and a blonde bombshell. While performing on Broadway in 1954, she was recruited by director Elia Kazan to play the lead in Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll . 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 notable early roles included Giant and But Not for Me , as well as westerns such as The Big Country , How the West Was Won , and Cheyenne Autumn . In the mid-1960s, Baker became an established sex symbol for her roles in The Carpetbaggers , Sylvia , and Harlow . 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 and Knife of Ice , before re-emerging for American audiences as a character actress in Andy Warhol’s cult film Bad .
Baker worked prominently in television throughout the 1980s and 1990s, appearing on the series Murder, She Wrote; L.A. Law, and Roswell, and had supporting roles in the films Ironweed , Kindergarten Cop and The Game . She formally retired from acting in 2002. In addition to acting, Baker is also the author of three books.
