Claudette Colbert, early 1930s
In the early 1930s, Academy Award-winning actress Claudette Colbert bought the property at 11220 Sunset Blvd. (consisting of two lots), plus a third adjacent lot to the west which was maintained as a big garden. She had the Janss Company, the owner and the developer of all of Westwood, custom build a one-story ranch house for her, which was completed in 1934 or 1935. She moved in with her husband Dr. Joel Pressman, who was the head of the UCLA Neck & Hand Surgery Dept. Shortly afterwards, Claudette Colbert (Pressman) won the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her performance as female lead in the movie It Happened One Night, costarring Clark Gable.
Colbert’s acting career skyrocketed overnight — she was making $500,000 year during the Great Depression, and for a time she was the highest-paid person in the movie industry. She then bought a mansion on a four-acre estate on N. Faring Road in Holmby Hills, across from what was then the Westlake School for girls (now co-ed Harvard-Westlake). Decades later she sold her N. Faring Road property, which was subdivided into a number of separate lots. She still kept her Sunset Blvd. property for her mother to live in, until she sold it about 20 years later, in 1954. In the mid-1950s, a separate house was built on the adjacent lot to the west which had been their garden.
In the 1980s, her original Sunset Blvd. house was torn down by a new owner and his family, who then custom built and lived in the house currently at that address, which was completed in 1989. Later the head of the UCLA Plastic Surgery Dept. bought that Sunset Blvd. house for his family to live in. The current owners bought it from him in late 2002.
Claudette Colbert was lifelong friends with Ronald Reagan. While Reagan was president of the United States, he and his wife Nancy visited Colbert at her Barbados Island Caribbean estate home, spending the night there as Colbert’s guests. https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/386056644/ .
(Thanks to the current property owners on Sunset Blvd. for sharing this interesting bit of Westwood Hills history!)