Despite significant prepublicity, Harlow was a critical failure, and Baker relocated to Italy in 1966 amid a legal dispute over her contract with Paramount and Levine's overseeing of her career.

[4] There, she was a classmate of Mike Nichols, Rod Steiger, Shelley Winters, and Marilyn Monroe; she also became a close friend of James Dean for the rest of his life.

[15][16] After appearing in television commercials for Winston cigarettes and Coca-Cola,[17] Baker was featured in an episode of Monodrama Theater performing a monodramatic piece, which was broadcast in 1952 on the DuMont Network.

This led to her landing roles in two Broadway productions: Roger MacDougall's Escapade in the fall of 1953, and Robert Anderson's All Summer Long, opposite Ed Begley, which ran from September to mid-November 1954.

According to Baker, she had been offered numerous leading parts in feature films before that point, but chose to debut in a supporting role in Giant because she was "insecure" and "wanted to start out a little less 'profile.

[23] Simultaneously, Baker was cast as the title character in Elia Kazan's Baby Doll (1956),[24] a role initially intended for Marilyn Monroe.

[27] In the fall of 1956, artist Robert Everheart, under contract with Warner Bros., constructed a 135-foot-tall (41 m) billboard in Times Square promoting the film, depicting the now-iconic image of a scantily clad Baker lying in a crib sucking her thumb.

[31] In support of Baker, Marilyn Monroe appeared at the film's premiere, working as an usherette to help bolster ticket sales, the proceeds of which were donated to the Actors Studio.

Variety said that her performance "captures all the animal charm, the naivete, the vanity, contempt and rising passion of Baby Doll",[33] while Bosley Crowther of The New York Times praised Baker's ability to exhibit "a piteously flimsy little twist of juvenile greed, inhibitions, physical yearnings, common crudities and conceits".

[39] Baker was also chosen by MGM for the lead in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and by Twentieth Century Fox for The Three Faces of Eve (1957), but her contract with Warner Bros. again prevented her from accepting the roles.

[44] She followed The Big Country with lead roles in two romances, portraying a nun in The Miracle (1959), co-starring Roger Moore, and in But Not for Me (1959), a comedy with Clark Gable.

In this independent production, she plays a young college student from the Bronx who is raped one night in St. James Park, and later held captive by a Manhattan mechanic (Ralph Meeker), who witnessed her subsequent suicide attempt.

[50] In addition to film acting, Baker also found time to appear again on Broadway, starring in the 1962 production of Garson Kanin's Come on Strong in the fall of that year.

[53] She then had a supporting role as Saint Veronica in George Stevens' The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), and portrayed a cynical, alcoholic movie star in The Carpetbaggers (1964), which brought her a second wave of notoriety in spite of the film's lackluster reviews.

[54] The New York Times called the film "a sickly sour distillation" of the source novel, but said Baker's performance "brought some color and a sandpaper personality as the sex-loaded widow.

Based on her Carpetbaggers performance, Levine began to develop Baker as a movie sex symbol, and she appeared posing in the December 1964 issue of Playboy.

In 1966, Baker had been invited to the Venice International Film Festival, where she met director Marco Ferreri,[69] who asked her to play the lead role in Her Harem (1967).

So Perverse (1969), Orgasmo (1969), A Quiet Place to Kill (1970), and Il coltello di ghiaccio (Knife of Ice) (1972), all giallo films directed by Italian filmmaker Umberto Lenzi.

"[71] As with Paranoia, the majority of the films she made in Italy received poor critical reception in the United States,[72] though they afforded Baker—who had left Hollywood in debt and with two children to support— an income, as well as fame abroad.

TV Guide referred to the film as an "exceptionally handsome example of 1970s Italian pop-exploitation filmmaking sweetened by Piero Umilani's lounge-jazz score", and praised Baker's performance, but noted that she was "physically wrong for the role; her elaborate lace-and-beribboned costumes sometimes make her look more like a fleshy Miss Havisham than a sleekly predatory sorceress".

[74] Baker's first American film in over 10 years came in the Andy Warhol–produced black comedy Bad (1977), in which she plays the lead role of a Queens beauty salon owner who provides hitmen with jobs, starring alongside Susan Tyrrell and Perry King.

"[75] She followed Bad with a part in the low-budget surrealist thriller The Sky Is Falling (1979) with Dennis Hopper, playing a washed-up actress living among expatriates in a Spanish village.

She starred in a supporting role in the 1980 Walt Disney-produced horror film The Watcher in the Woods, alongside Bette Davis, after having been asked by British director John Hough, a longtime admirer of her work.

In the latter Baker plays a 1930s Chicago housewife, mother of a teenage girl accidentally killed by an African American chauffeur, who attempts to cover up the accident.

[78] Following Native Son, Baker had a critically acclaimed lead role as the wife of a schizophrenic drifter (played by Jack Nicholson) in Ironweed (1987), alongside Meryl Streep.

[79] In 1990, Baker played the role of Eleanor Crisp—described by Roger Ebert as "an effective bitch on wheels"[80]—in Ivan Reitman's comedy Kindergarten Cop, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, which she filmed in Astoria, Oregon, in the summer of 1990.

The 1990s also had Baker more frequently appearing on television series, including episodes of Grand (1990), Tales from the Crypt (1991, opposite Teri Garr in a segment directed by Michael J.

[92][93] After leaving Hollywood in the mid-1960s, Baker traveled with Bob Hope's Christmas USO troupe entertaining soldiers in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, an experience which she described as reformative: "In the hospitals I held the hands of damaged young men, and I realized that my pain was not exclusive: that in this world there was suffering much more terrible than mine.

[96] In February 2014, she served as maid of honor at longtime friend, psychologist, and former actor, Dr Patrick Suraci's wedding to his partner, Tony Perkins, in New York.

[102][103] A 1956 photograph by Diane Arbus depicts Baker onscreen in Baby Doll with a passing silhouette during a New York City theater screening of the film.