Paulette Goddard came within one screen test of playing Scarlett O'Hara
By December 1938 the search for Gone with the Wind's heroine was down to two women: Vivien Leigh and Paulette Goddard. Goddard lost, partly because a publicist warned she was dynamite that would blow up in the studio's face. She became one of Paramount's biggest stars anyway.
Born Marion Levy in New York City in 1910, she grew up moving often with her mother after her parents split, and began modelling for stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue. A great-uncle, the businessman Charles Goddard, introduced her to Florenz Ziegfeld, and in 1926 she debuted as a dancer in his revue No Foolin' under the name Paulette Goddard. At 17 she married Edgar James, a lumber company president, and the eventual divorce brought her a $375,000 settlement. Her relationship with her father stayed bitter: after she claimed in a 1938 magazine interview that he was not her real father, he sued and won $35 a week, and at his death left her $1.
Hollywood started slowly, with uncredited parts for Samuel Goldwyn and Hal Roach. Then in 1932 she began seeing Charlie Chaplin, who sent her for acting lessons and cast her as the runaway orphan in Modern Times (1936), her first credited role. She co-starred with him again as Hannah in The Great Dictator (1940), their last film together before their marriage broke down.
The Scarlett contest came in between. David O. Selznick and George Cukor judged her the most promising candidate, but beyond the publicist's warning, Selznick feared conflicts with her Chaplin contracts, and the fact that no certificate could be produced for her marriage to Chaplin brought hostile publicity from conservative women's groups. On loan to MGM she stood out in The Women (1939), which Pauline Kael later praised.
Paramount signed her in 1939 and paired her with Bob Hope in The Cat and the Canary, which lifted both careers. Cecil B. DeMille used her in North West Mounted Police and in Reap the Wild Wind, the studio's top earner of 1942, and her army nurse in So Proudly We Hail! earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. Kitty, for which she learned a cockney accent, became her biggest Paramount success. Later marriages to Burgess Meredith and the novelist Erich Maria Remarque drew heavy press interest, and after the second she settled in Switzerland, largely gave up acting, and died there in 1990.
Source: Paulette Goddard
