Bette Davis

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{{#if: {{{image_name|}}}| Template:! style="font-size: smaller;" Template:!Image:Bettedavis.jpg
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Neuilly-sur-Seine, France}}
Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis
Born
April 5, 1908
Lowell, Massachusetts, USA

This article is about the actress; there is also a singer named Betty Davis.

Bette Davis (April 5, 1908 – October 6, 1989), was a two-time Academy Award-winning American actress of stage, screen and television.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and christened Ruth Elizabeth Davis, Bette Davis was renowned for her intense, forceful personae and artistic versatility during a career that spanned six decades and almost one hundred films.

Co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen with actor John Garfield and one of the most respected divas of cinema's Golden Age, Davis is remembered for her tremendous screen presence and portrayals of strong women. Her equally turbulent offscreen life included stormy marriages, affairs, and legendary battles with both male studio bosses and other actresses.

Alternately referred to as the "Queen of Hollywood", the "First Lady of the American Screen", and "the Fifth Warner Brother", Davis held the record for most Oscar nominations (10) for Best Actress until bested by Katharine Hepburn (12). Davis was the first woman to serve as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as well as the first actress to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award (1977) from the American Film Institute (AFI) (in 1999 AFI voted her the second greatest female film legend of all time, second to Katharine Hepburn). In 2005 Davis tied Vivien Leigh as the actress with the most memorable film quotes (AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes). She has inspired a #1 song, and has been both the author and subject of several books.

Offscreen, Davis was the source of several now-famous quips about womanhood, acting, and Hollywood, often offered with biting wit. Davis also earned a reputation as combative and difficult to work with. Her physical presence, manner of speaking, and frequent histrionic and mannered acting has garnered her a strong cult following. Film critic Leonard Maltin noted, "by the time she died Davis had won a status enjoyed by no other Hollywood actress", and many fans and film professionals consider her the best screen actress of all time.

Contents

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The early years

Davis was born to Harlow Morrell Davis, a descendant of Welsh Puritans, and Ruth Favor, a descendant of Huguenot and upper-class English pioneers.[1] In 1918 Davis' father ran off, leaving Bette and her younger sister, Barbara, to be raised in genteel poverty by their mother, who had aspired to be an actress. As a child Bette aspired to be a dancer, until she decided that actors led a more glamorous life.

Upon graduation from Cushing Academy, a prep school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, Davis was denied admission to Eva LeGallienne's Manhattan Civic Repertory because she was considered insincere. She then enrolled in John Murray Anderson's dramatic school (where three years younger classmate Lucille Ball was sent back home to upstate New York because she was "too shy"), and Davis became a star pupil.

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The ingenue

Her first professional stage performance was in The Earth Between, Off-Broadway in 1928. Her first Broadway performance was in 1929 in the comedy Broken Dishes and later in Solid South. Broken Dishes would be made into an early sound movie, under a different name, with the five years younger Loretta Young playing Davis' role of Elaine Bumstead.

The next year she was hired by Universal Studios, but they felt she was not star material and, in December 1931, let her sign with Warner Brothers. Her first major role was in The Man Who Played God.

Until the end of Davis' life she would credit the film's star, George Arliss, with personally insisting upon her as his leading lady, giving her a chance to show her mettle. More moderately successful movies followed, but the role of the cynical and disturbed Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage (1934) earned Bette major critical acclaim. The Motion Picture Academy did not nominate Davis for this tour de force, which prompted write-in votes from disgruntled Academy members.

A much-publicized legal battle with Warner Brothers, which was aimed at stopping them from putting her in inferior movies, led to a dramatic improvement in the quality of her films (although she lost the case). She went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for Dangerous (1935) and the romantic melodrama Jezebel (1938), directed by William Wyler, with whom she was rumored to be having an affair.

Bette portrayed a hot-headed, selfish Southern woman who proved courageous when her former boyfriend (played by Henry Fonda) fell ill. Now she was able to name her own roles, with the exception of Gone with the Wind (1939).

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The middle years

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The established star

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Davis was elected the ninth president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, whose award she claimed to have named "Oscar", but only served from October to December 1941 when she resigned. With the outbreak of WWII, Davis took on a patriotic role both as one of the founders and president of the Hollywood Canteen for visiting armed forces servicemen.

The early 1940s saw Davis' popularity continue to grow with such films as The Letter (1940) and The Little Foxes (1941), both directed by William Wyler, plus roles as a timid spinster who blossoms into a vital and charming woman in the melodrama Now, Voyager (1942), directed by Irving Rapper, and a vain but charming society woman in Mr. Skeffington (1944), directed by Vincent Sherman, another director with whom she was romantically linked.

Her career stagnated during the late 1940s, so she left Warner Bros. After her remarkable performance as the glamorous, aging theatrical actress Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950), directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, she received another Oscar nomination. This role contains the line that Davis is perhaps most associated with: "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night." Davis often commented that the role "brought me back from the dead". The other films that she appeared in during the 1950s did not equal the quality of All About Eve, and by the end of the decade she was no longer in demand.

In 1961 she placed an advertisement for "job wanted" in the trade papers. Davis later observed that, although she intended it as a joke, there was considerable truth in it and that, above all else, she simply wanted the opportunity to continue working.

Bette's quite frightening performance in 1962's over-the-top What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, directed by Robert Aldrich and co-starring her long-time rival, Joan Crawford, earned her another Oscar nomination. Her performance as a demented former child star living in a decaying mansion with her wheelchair-bound sister was a smash hit and a top-grosser that year.

Recognizing the renewed box-office potential in his former contract player, Jack Warner signed Davis for another venture into the macabre in 1964's Dead Ringer, where she played identical twin sisters (one of whom murders the other) opposite murderous gigolo Peter Lawford, and detective Karl Malden, who is in love with the good sister. In this updated homage to A Stolen Life (1946), Davis and her Now, Voyager (1942) co-star Paul Henreid were reunited with Henreid directing Davis.

Also that year she starred in another Robert Aldrich picture, Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), a grand guignol Southern gothic melodrama, with Davis as an elderly recluse slowly being driven mad; she is in fear of losing her condemned home, whilst simultaneously an old murder is exposed and her relatives gang up on her.

Joan Crawford was scheduled to co-star in the film, but bowed out following reported conflicts with Davis, although, as the syndicated American columnist Liz Smith pointed out, it was Davis who rebuffed Crawford's repeated "attempts at a Pax Romana". Bette and Joan (by Shaun Considine) entertainingly follows these two major stars' decades of conflict and dislike. Image:Witw-pubstill1.jpg While she appeared in The Nanny (1965), The Anniversary (1967), Bunny O'Hare (1971), Burnt Offerings (1976), Death on the Nile (1978) and The Watcher in the Woods (1980), Davis spent most of the remainder of her career on the small screen, working in TV movies of varying quality. She appeared in The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978), a very well-made miniseries with Davis as the mysterious and almost omniscient Widow Fortune in a small insular village in Connecticut. The original story (Harvest Home) was written by the now deceased writer/actor, Tom Tryon.

She won a Best Actress Emmy Award for Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter (1979), a TV production with Gena Rowlands playing Davis' dying daughter.

She also appeared in Lindsay Anderson's elegiac The Whales of August (1987), in which she played the blind sister of another legendary star, Lillian Gish. Her last role was the title role in Larry Cohen's film Wicked Stepmother (1989), whose set she abandoned due to difficulties with the director; she was replaced by a cat which was her magical incarnation. She died of cancer, aged 81, in France that same year.

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The later years

In 1977 Davis became the first woman to receive the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1979 she won a Best Actress Emmy. Davis walked out on her last film, Wicked Stepmother, which was released after her death in 1989, although her scenes were retained.

She wrote three biographies, The Lonely Life (1962), Mother Goddam(1974), and This 'N' That (1987). Bette Davis, The Lonely Life (1990) was published the year after her death, with an update.

Davis' only biological child, Barbara Davis Sherry (nicknamed B.D., and then known as B.D. Hyman), was born in 1947 during the actress' third marriage to William Grant Sherry. Allegedly a born-again Christian (who claimed that prayer had cured her of ovarian cancer), B.D. wrote a scathing 1985 book (My Mother's Keeper). It was about her relationship with her mother, in which she portrayed both her mother and her (adoptive) father, actor Gary Merrill, as controlling and self-involved. She also accused Davis of being anti-Semitic and of having denigrated Laurence Olivier.

Davis vehemently denied these last two accusations in print, but did not publicly address or respond to the specifics of the other accusations, possibly due to their extremely private nature, which she respected, although B.D. did not. Despite knowing of her mother's very poor health, it is unfortunate that Hyman did not wait for her mother to pass away before printing her inflammatory allegations. Christina Crawford had the stability and temperament to delay writing about her own stepmother, Davis' old enemy, Joan Crawford.

While Davis admitted that her career had always come first, those who knew mother and daughter said that Davis, although difficult, was a loving mother and grandmother. Davis said the book's publication was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Davis had also adopted two children with Merrill: Margot, who was eventually institutionalized due to a brain injury; and Michael, who had a close and loving relationship with his mother.

On July 19, 2001, Steven Spielberg purchased Davis' Oscar for Jezebel at a Christie's auction and returned it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The money was used to help the Bette Davis Foundation for aspiring actors, where her son, Michael, serves on the board of directors.

Singer and actress Bette Midler's birth name was 'Bette Davis Midler'. Reportedly, Midler's mother, Ruth, was a Davis fan, but because she had never heard the actress's first name pronounced, pronounced her own daughter's name as one syllable.

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Death

Davis died on October 6, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, (near Paris) following a long battle with breast cancer, and after having suffered several strokes.

She was returning from the Donostia-San Sebastián International Film Festival in Spain, where she had been honored.

She is interred in Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. On her tombstone is written: "She did it the hard way".

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Academy Awards and nominations

Bette Davis had the most nominations for an actor in the history of the Oscars, with 10 nominations, until finally bested by Katharine Hepburn, who wound up with 12 nominations.

Unlike Meryl Streep, who is lauded for having "beaten" Hepburn by being nominated 13 times, it should be pointed out that Davis and Hepburn were only nominated as Best Actress, whereas a number of Streep's nominations are for Best Supporting Actress, so some might argue that Hepburn is still the actress with exclusively Best Actress nominations. Streep has only equalled Davis' Best Actress nomination tally.

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Filmography

Template:Start box {{succession box | title=Academy Award for Best Actress | before=Claudette Colbert for It Happened One Night | years=1935 | after=Luise Rainer for The Great Ziegfeld}} {{succession box | title=Academy Award for Best Actress | before=Luise Rainer for The Good Earth | years=1938 | after=Vivien Leigh for Gone with the Wind}} Template:End

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Trivia

  • She said Dark Victory (1939) was her personal favorite of all the films she had made.
  • She was rumoured to have been the object of attraction by several of her female co-stars, such as Barbara Stanwyck, Miriam Hopkins and Joan Crawford, all of whose advances the extremely heterosexual Davis coldly rebuffed, thus earning their dislike, if not enmity.
  • In 1981 "Bette Davis Eyes" was an international hit song by Kim Carnes. After the song became a hit, Davis wrote to songwriters Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon, and to singer Kim Carnes, to thank them and ask them how they knew so much about her. One of the reasons Davis loved the song is that her grandson thought she was now "cool" because she had a song written about her.
  • She is mentioned in Madonna's song Vogue ("Bette Davis ... we love you").
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External links

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