We are about to hit a stretch of people who have been moved up the schedule on the “holy crap, they’re still alive?” principle. Diane Baker was born in 1938. My schedule is currently booked until January 2027, leaving aside a handful of openings for which she does not, to my knowledge, qualify. Oh, I might be able to make an argument that her fifth-billed appearance in Marnie and a handful of obscure movies and an episode of Night Gallery could fit her in for October, but let’s be real—I’d rather move Gina Gershon, who is roughly a quarter century younger than Baker, and not risk waiting any longer than necessary.
Actually, I turn out to think of Diane Baker from an astonishing list of places. For Not Bizarrely Fixated On Mid-Century Live Action Disney people, the two obvious choices are, yes, Marnie, where she’s the sister of Sean Connery’s character’s late first wife, and Silence of the Lambs, where she’s Senator Ruth Martin, mother of Buffalo Bill’s latest abductee. They are very different roles; Lil is in many ways more similar to Clarice than she is to Senator Martin, and Lil might be better suited toward a life solving crimes. Certainly she’d be better off having something to do than sitting around being wealthy.
But leaving aside Lil, probably the next place I think of Baker is in The Horse in the Grey Flannel Suit. (Not on Disney+, alas.) It’s a fun movie, starring Dean Jones; it’s the only movie he did with Kurt Russell. Baker is second-billed, playing a riding instructor who teaches the teenage daughter of the Jones character. She works with an ex-boyfriend, giving us a nice spot of jealousy. She really charming in it, standing her own against Jones when she needs to and being supportive of Ellen Janov as Helen. I don’t know if she did her own riding and am in fact inclined to doubt it, given there’s nothing about show jumping on her Wikipedia and IMDb pages.
Okay, you folks who aren’t as in to that sort of thing as I am might also just know her as, oh, Margot Frank from The Diary of Anne Frank, her first movie role. She launched into fairly impressive roles pretty early. I’m not sure she was ever first-billed in anything, but she was in the top five in a lot of things almost immediately. Journey to the Center of the Earth may have been a bad movie—whether it’s better or worse than the Brendan Fraser version is an interesting and pointless argument—but she’s got pretty high billing in it. A lot of the time, she’s appearing with astonishingly famous people, from Joan Crawford to Ricardo Montalban. She’s Andrew McCarthy’s mother in The Joy Luck Club, even.
Oh, and TV. We haven’t even gotten into TV yet. We must of course mention CBS Schoolbreak Special, ABC Afterschool Special, and The ABC Afternoon Playbreak. Columbo, where she plays an alcoholic and the daughter of the episode’s first victim and wife of the second. Three episodes of Murder, She Wrote. Her TV career stretches from Playhouse 90 in 1959 to a TV movie called The Surrogate in 2013. She did a lot of the highlight shows you’d expect in between. You see why we had to rearrange the schedule.