She was born under the roofs of Paris and grew up on the sidewalks of New York. With these blessed accidents of heredity and environment, it is little wonder that Claudette Colbert came to embody an effervescent blend of couture elegance and city-girl pluck. She could play the Queen of Egypt, regally ignoring a siege of hiccups, in Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra or a gold digger getting more than by on sheer brass in The Gilded Lily and a dozen other blithe comedies. She was at home on the range in Texas Lady, or on the road showing Clark Gable how to hitch a ride (by exposing just a bit of leg) in her Oscar-winning role as the runaway heiress in It Happened One Night.

Colbert's movie career stretched back to the silent era and the first talkies, which she played in both English- and French-language versions. Her Broadway and West End roles kept her busy into her mid-80s. When she died last week at 92 at her home in Barbados, the sad news sent a reminder from old Hollywood to new: American cinema once had a thing called glamour, and its name might have been Colbert.

Most of the actress-legends who played in early talkies were celestial eminences, draped in hauteur. Colbert was different: she never forgot that she was Lily Chauchoin, a Manhattan gal who made it on her own. That spirit informed the Colbert heroine, who walked the earth in sensible shoes and met each adversity with a throaty, musical laugh. Sophisticated but not stuffy, a superior creature who never condescended, she proved the maxim that a lady should be, first and foremost, a woman.

Not that she didn't flummox her leading men into stammering or purple prose. They threw their hearts at her slim figure like so many quoits, and she deflected their ardor with a stare, both knowing and surprised, that seemed to say, "Oh, darling, really!" She could handle surly-burly swains like John Wayne and Joel McCrea just as neatly; brute force was no match for the smile in her eyes. Told she is "hard" in the 1933 Torch Singer, she snaps, "Sure I am. Just like glass. So hard nothing can cut it but diamonds. Come around with a fistful sometime--maybe we can get together." The comeback, the put-down, the come-on, all in one sprightly barrage. Cool Claudette: winner and still champion.

Some critics thought Colbert more a Star than an Actress. After all, she had come to prominence as the handmaiden of DeMille. She spent a lot of time in pajamas and occasionally took a movie bath in a secluded pool or by a waterfall; in DeMille's The Sign of the Cross, she bathed in asses' milk. Then there was this familiar tale: Colbert was so vain about her left profile that she insisted on being photographed only on that side; sets had to be built with doors on the right, so she could enter with her left side to the camera.

The fact was that Colbert shone as both star and actress. In Imitation of Life (1934) and Since You Went Away, she played troubled American moms with unflinching conviction. John Ford made her a stalwart frontierswoman in Drums Along the Mohawk. But acting isn't simply striking tragic poses. It can mean illuminating the breezy-bitter spirit of such top craftsmen as Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, Mitchell Leisen, Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges. In their films Colbert's subtle gestures offered character insights: a slight shiver of anxiety as her tiny airplane is strafed by the enemy in the Wilder-Leisen Arise My Love. No emotional special effects--tears, moaning, the clutching of a seatmate's hand--are needed. Just the acting that conceals Acting.

She could have stayed in Hollywood, playing bitches and hags: that was how actresses of a certain age hung on in movies. But Colbert took the high road to the legitimate theater, ornamenting such fluff as The Marriage-Go-Round and The Irregular Verb to Love, and a side road into the 1987 TV mini-series The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. Her true second career was her Barbados home, where she gaily entertained Presidents (Ronald Reagan) and stars (Frank Sinatra). Little Lily Chauchoin had finally become Lady Claudette Colbert.

That transformation could be found in Colbert's best roles. These were stories about acting, about women who through charm and technique convinced society that they were something other, better, more glamorous than the real thing. In the pearly 1939 comedy Midnight, for example, she is a poor woman masquerading as a countess. Despite concrete evidence to the contrary, her high-class friends refuse to believe that a woman as divinely witty as she could ever be common. For the life of talking pictures--in the grand cinema palaces, on the Late Show or in a video-store cinematheque--movie lovers have believed Colbert's beguiling masquerade. In Midnight, John Barrymore hears someone say of Colbert, "So wonderful, isn't she?" "Amazing," Barrymore replies.