Diane Baker

Actress

Popular As Diane Carol Baker

Birthday February 25, 1938

Birth Sign Pisces

Birthplace Los Angeles, California, U.S.

Age 86 years old

Nationality United States

Height 5' 6" (1.68 m)

#17279 Most Popular

1938

Diane Carol Baker (born February 25, 1938) is an American actress, producer and educator whose career spanned nearly 50 years.

Baker was born February 25, 1938 at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California and raised in the Los Angeles neighborhoods of North Hollywood and Studio City.

She is the daughter of Dorothy Helen Harrington, who had appeared in several early Marx Brothers movies, and automobile salesman Clyde Lucius Baker.

Baker has two younger sisters, Patricia and Cheryl.

1956

At age 18, after graduating from Van Nuys High School in 1956, Baker moved to New York to study acting with Charles Conrad and ballet with Nina Fonaroff.

1958

After securing a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox in 1958, Baker made her film debut when she was chosen by director George Stevens to play Margot Frank in the 1959 motion picture The Diary of Anne Frank.

In the same year, she starred in Journey to the Center of the Earth with James Mason and Pat Boone; and in The Best of Everything with Hope Lange and Joan Crawford.

Other Fox films in which Baker appeared include the assassination thriller Nine Hours to Rama, Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man, and The 300 Spartans.

1960

Her television work, which began in the 1960s, includes appearances on Follow the Sun, Bus Stop, Adventures in Paradise, The Lloyd Bridges Show, The Nurses, The Invaders (in the first episode), and two episodes of Route 66.

1962

Finally out of her contract with Fox after starring in the fourth screen version of Grace Miller White's novel Tess of the Storm Country and The 300 Spartans (1962), Baker appeared in Stolen Hours, a 1963 remake of Dark Victory (Mirisch Corp. and United Artists), and, the same year, opposite Paul Newman and Elke Sommer in The Prize (MGM).

1963

From 1963 to 1966, Baker had a recurring role on the medical drama Dr. Kildare.

1964

In 1964, she co-starred with Joan Crawford in both Strait-Jacket, William Castle's thriller about an axe murderess, and an unsold television pilot Royal Bay, released to theaters as Della.

Alfred Hitchcock cast her in his film Marnie (1964) as Lil Mainwaring, the sister-in-law of Mark Rutland (Sean Connery).

1965

She co-starred with Gregory Peck and Walter Matthau in the thriller Mirage (1965), directed by Edward Dmytryk, and in Krakatoa, East of Java (1969) with Maximilian Schell.

1966

In the TV movie Western The Dangerous Days of Kiowa Jones (1966), she played the role of a woman who falls in love with a drifter (Robert Horton) who is deputized by a dying marshal to take two killers (one of whom is played by Sal Mineo) to a distant jail.

1967

In August 1967, Baker played David Janssen's love interest in the two-part finale of The Fugitive, which became the most-watched show in the history of episodic television up until that time.

1968

In 1968, she co-starred with Dean Jones in the Disney film The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit.

1970

In January 1970, she had the lead guest-starring female role as Princess Francesca in the only three-episode mission of Mission: Impossible.

1973

In 1973, Baker co-starred in ABC sitcom Here We Go Again.

The series was canceled after one season.

1976

In 1976, she played the frequently drunken daughter of the title character of the Columbo episode "Last Salute to the Commodore".

1980

In the decades after Mirage, she appeared frequently on television and began producing films, including the drama film Never Never Land (1980) and the miniseries A Woman of Substance (1984), in which she played Laura.

1991

She reemerged on the big screen in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) as Senator Ruth Martin.

Baker also appeared in the films The Joy Luck Club, The Cable Guy, The Net and A Mighty Wind.

2005

She guest-starred in four episodes of House in 2005, 2008, and twice in 2012 as Blythe House, the mother of the title character.

Baker spent more than a decade teaching acting at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.

She was formerly the executive director of the School of Motion Pictures-Television and the School of Acting.

Baker has dated Warren Beatty, Gardner McKay, Frank Langella, Michael Lerner and John Saxon.