Diane Baker

Executive Director Motion Pictures, Television & Acting Academy of Art University San Francisco CA [November 2009]

While continues to act in film and television, Ms. Baker is the executive director of the School of Motion Pictures, Television, and Acting at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. [November 2008]

Interviewed in the SF Chronicle, she is now heading the acting program at the SF Academy of Art. [August 2004]

More recently, she distinguished herself essaying the role of clan matriarch Rose Kennedy in the CBS miniseries Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (2000) and performed memorably with Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (1991) as the distraught Senator Ruth Martin and, with Jim Carrey and Matthew Broderick, in The Cable Guy (1996).

While continuing to perform, Baker moved into producing small, independent films such as The Mouse and the Motorcycle: Portrait of Grandpa Doc (1977) with director Randal Kleiser and Never Never Land (1980) with Petula Clark, and larger projects such as the Emmy-nominated television miniseries adaptation of Barbara Taylor Bradford's A Woman of Substance (1984) with Deborah Kerr.

She produced sensitive, affecting work in Rod Serling's touching Night Gallery: They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar/The Last Laurel (1971) and, in a colorful turn as an unstable dipsomaniac, in Columbo: Last Salute to the Commodore (1976).

After her contract ended, she worked on a pair of distinguished projects at Universal Studios: Mirage (1965) with Gregory Peck and Marnie (1964) for director Alfred Hitchcock. Baker was also a reliable performer in episodic television.

An August 1960 The Hollywood Reporter news item noted that Baker was originally to co-star with Elvis Presley in Flaming Star (1960).

Actress with a notable career in films and television. Born and raised in Hollywood, she moved to New York at eighteen to study acting with Charles Conrad and ballet with Nina Fonaroff. She continued her training in Los Angeles at the Estelle Harman Workshop, securing a contract with Twentieth Century Fox. Baker's first film assignment was a true prestige picture: legendary director George Stevens cast her as Margot Frank, older sister of Anne, in The Diary of Anne Frank (1959).

Baker remained at Fox as a contract player performing in films such as Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959), The Best of Everything (1959) and Nine Hours to Rama (1963).

Was a contestant in the 1957 Miss Rheingold pageant, an annual promotion by Rheingold Beer (Liebmann Breweries), and was pictured on Rheingold beer cans issued during the promotion.