Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 24, 1990 TAG: 9004240481
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD LENGTH: Medium
Probably best-known for her appearances opposite Charlie Chaplin in "Modern Times" and "The Great Dictator," she was believed to be 84 but reports of her age varied by as many as 15 years.
"Any woman who would tell her age would tell anything," she said as long ago as 1936.
The cause of death has not yet been determined, said Pia DellaMora, a municipal employee in Ronco, Switzerland, where the actress had her villa.
Her husbands included a wealthy lumber industrialist, and actors Chaplin (although their secretive 1936 marriage in China was revealed only at their 1942 divorce in Mexico) and Burgess Meredith. Her last marriage was to novelist Erich Maria Remarque, who died in 1970.
She had lived almost exclusively in luxurious retirement in Europe since her 1958 marriage to Remarque, author of "All Quiet on the Western Front," returning only occasionally to the United States for a small TV role in the 1970s and to promote her husband's last novel "Shadows in Paradise," published after his death.
Born Marion Levee in Whitestone, N.Y., she began her career in a Florenz Ziegfeld revue because her uncle prevailed on his friend Ziegfeld to try her in a small role in "Rio Rita."
She married industrialist Edgar James while supposedly still in her teens. She went to Reno in 1931 to divorce him, continuing West to Hollywood, where she was cast as a Goldwyn Girl in "The Kid From Spain."
Unlike most film stars of the day, Goddard was tanned and athletic - addicted to tennis and long walks. She was viewed by her fans as saucy and mischievous but by Hollywood executives as a hard-boiled businesswoman who carefully invested her film earnings.
In 1940, her father sued her, complaining that the $300 a month support she gave him was inadequate. In his suit, he claimed that she had $5,000 a week to spend on "whims."
Goddard responded that it was because he had failed to keep up the $10 weekly alimony payments awarded her mother after her parents' divorce that she was forced to go to work at such an early age.
Over the years she appeared in such pictures as Cecil B. De Mille's "Northwest Mounted Police," in which she played a tempestuous half-breed siren, and in his "Unconquered," in which she bathed in a barrel.
She also starred in "The Women," "Hold Back the Dawn," "Reap the Wild Wind," "Star Spangled Rhythm," "So Proudly We Hail," "Kitty," "Duffy's Tavern," "Diary of a Chambermaid" and "Suddenly It's Spring."
She was reported to be a leading candidate for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in "Gone With the Wind" but the part eventually went to Vivien Leigh.
Her last screen role was as Claudia Cardinale's mother in the 1964 Italian film "Time of Indifference."
by CNB