Jetta Goudal: An actor that was actually blacklisted




Jetta Goudal (Her first name is pronounced ZHET-eh) was a star in films silent era, or at least she was until she sued movie mogul  Cecil B. DeMille for breach of contract. Adding insult to injury, she won the suit. Not that it mattered, it was a pyrrhic victory at best. Her career was over the second she sued DeMille. 
Goudal was born the daughter of Mozes Goudeket, a wealthy, orthodox Jewish diamond cutter in the Jordanian neighborhood of Gou, Amsterdam, Holland although she went through her life denying she was Jewish and claiming to be French or French-Canadian. She denied her birth father and said that she was the daughter of Maurice Guillaume Goudal, a fictional European lawyer. She also lied about her age claiming she was born in Paris in 1910, making her ten years younger than she actually was.
Goudal left Europe and appeared on Broadway in 1921 but she was made to be filmed. She was beautiful, tall and regal and when the legendary producer/director Cecil B. DeMille saw her in two small roles, he was mesmerized by her and placed her in four big films made between 1925 and 1927.  The films were successful, but Goudal was known far and wide across Hollywood as an extremely difficult talent to work with, a screamer with an inexhaustible temper.
Her ultra-diva mood cost the studio money because she delayed filming by complaining over every conceivable aspect of movie making, from her lines to scenery. Rather than deal with her any more, DeMille her contract and fired her.
Her fits of rage had already gotten her fired from two other smaller studios with Goudal suing them for a breach of contract. In turn, Goudal sued DeMille for breach of contract, saying “I came here as a foreigner: I had not been married or divorced: there was no scandal attached to my name. They had to say something about me, so the publicity departments wrote stories of their own fantasy and called me temperamental and hard to handle. They ended up believing their own creations.”
She won the suit largely because DeMille couldn’t provide proof that Goudal had cost him tens of thousands in production money. It wasn’t that he didn’t have the records to prove the cost, it was that the studios didn’t want their peculiar and shady finances made public, so they let Goudal win the battle, but they won the war. (The court granted her $31,000 in damages, a very substantial amount of money at the time, about a half a million dollars today)
After the suit, the studios closed ranks on Goudal, not that anyone wanted to hire her anyway, her temper tantrums had sealed that fate, but also because by then,  sound had been added to film, and Goudal’s thick accent made her almost impossible to understand in person and wouldn’t work at all on film.
She did make a few more films but by 1932, her once-promising career was over.  Goudal married art director Harold Grieve and left films forever. The couple ran a successful interior design business in Hollywood for decades. In the 1940s, Goudal lost nearly all her relatives in the Holocaust. Her sister Bertha died in a concentration camp in 1945. Bertha’s husband died at the same camp a year earlier. Jetta's 82-year-old father, her step-mother and nephew were killed at Sobibór extermination camp.
Always plagued by health problems and a heart condition, Jetta Goudal's  last years were grim. In 1973, a fall left her an invalid. She died 12 years later, in 1985.

Just because someone’s name appeared in Red Channels, that doesn’t mean they were blacklisted. It just means there name appeared in Red Channels.
Just because a person said they were blacklisted doesn’t mean they were. Many people in Hollywood have lied about being blacklisted over the years.
If  a person was actually blacklisted…and not many were actually blacklisted….it was the studios and TV sponsors who blacklisted them. Not the United States federal government.
If a person claims the blacklist ruined their career, they should be able to prove they had a career before the blacklist.