Carroll Baker

Carroll Baker (born May 28, 1931) is an American former 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 ...