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Bette Davis
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Ruth Elizabeth Davis (April
5, 1908 – October 6, 1989),
was an American actress of stage, screen and
television.
Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, she is better
known as Bette Davis, this superstar was renowned for her intense, forceful
persona and her artistic versatility during career that spanned six decades and
over one hundred films. Founder of the Hollywood
Canteen and one of the most beloved divas of cinema's Golden Age, Davis is
most remembered as a symbol of feminist strength, stemming from her portrayals
of ruthless, hysterical or unsympathetic women and her equally turbulent
offscreen life that included several stormy marriages and legendary battles with
male studio heads.
Alternately referred to as the "Queen of Hollywood" or the "First Lady of the
Screen," Davis for a time held the record most Oscar nominations (11) for Best Actress, since broken by
Katharine
Hepburn (12). To this day, Davis remains one of the most lauded and idolized
stars in film history, having been the subject of one of the most successful #1
songs of pop history, "Bette Davis Eyes" (1981), as well as becoming the first woman to serve as
president of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences. She was the first actress to receive the Lifetime
Achievement Award (1979) from the American Film Institute, which in 1999
voted her the second greatest female film legend of all-time. In 2004, Davis became the most represented actress on AFI's ballot of 100
Greatest Film Roles and in 2005 joined three others as the most represented
actress on their ballot of 100 Greatest Film Quotes. Offscreen, Davis was the
source of several now-famous quips about womanhood, acting, and Hollywood, often
offered with biting wit. Villified by her critics as a histrionic, mannered
overactor, she also suffered a reputation for being somewhat combative and
difficult to work with. Despite this, according to respected film historian and
critic Leonard Maltin "by the time she died Davis had won a status enjoyed by no
other Hollywood actress" and many fans and film professionals still consider her
the best screen actress of all time.
Davis's early years
Davis was born to Harlow Morrell Davis, a descendant of Welsh Puritans, and Ruth Favor, a descendant of Hugenot pioneers. In 1918, Davis's father
ran off, leaving Bette and her sister, Barbara, to be raised in genteel poverty
by their mother, who had aspired to be an actress. As a child, she 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. Undeterred, she enrolled in John Murray
Anderson's dramatic school (where classmate Lucille Ball was sent home because she was "too
shy"), and became a star pupil.
Davis, the ingenue Her first professional stage performance was The Earth Between, Off-Broadway in 1923. Her first Broadway performance was in 1929, in the comedy Broken Dishes and later in
Solid South. The next year, she was hired by Universal Studios, but they felt she was not
star material, and in 1932, they let her
sign with Warner
Brothers. Her first starring role was in The Man Who
Played God. More fairly successful movies followed but it was the role
of the cinic Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage (1934) that would give
Bette major acclaim from the film critics. The Motion Picture Academy failed to
nominate Davis for this tour de force, and such was the outrage that she
received many write-in votes from disgruntled Academy members.
A much-publicised legal battle with Warners to stop 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, in which she portrayed a
hot-headed and selfish southern woman who proved a great courage when her
boyfriend (played by Henry
Fonda) fell ill. Now she was able to name her own roles, with the exception
of Gone with the Wind in 1939. Davis, the established starDavis was elected the ninth president of the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences, whose award she claimed to have named the "Oscar", but
served only from October to December 1941,
when she resigned. With the outbreak of WWII, Davis took on a patriotic leadership role both as
one of the founders and as the president of the Hollywood Canteen for visiting
armed forces servicemen.
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The early 1940s saw Davis's popularity continue to grow with such films as
The Letter (1940) and
The Little
Foxes (1941), both of them directed by William Wyler, plus her roles as a timid spinster
who blossoms into a vital and charming woman of the world in the great melodrama
Now, Voyager
(1942), directed by Irving
Rapper, and a vain society woman in Mr. Skeffington (1944), directed by Vincent Sherman.
Her career stagnated during the late 1940s, so she left the Warner Bros. She was revived by
her wonderful performance of the charming and magnetic theatrical actress Margo
Channing in All About
Eve (1950), directed by Joseph L.
Mankiewicz, for which she received another Oscar nomination. 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. Her role in 1962's over-the-top What Ever
Happened to Baby Jane?, directed by Robert Aldrich, in which she played a demented
former child star who torments her crippled sister while living in their
decaying mansion, opposite her (mostly press-invented) long-time rival Joan Crawford, earned her
another Oscar
nomination. The film, which was the only one in which Davis and Crawford worked
together onscreen, was a smash hit and a top-grosser that year.
Two years later she starred in another great Aldrich's 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. While she appeared in The Nanny (1965), The
Anniversary (1968), 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 won a Best Actress Emmy for
Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter (1979), a great TV
production with Gena
Rowlands.
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). Davis, the iconIn 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. She wrote a
biography, The Lonely Life, in the 1960s, and Mother Goddam in 1975.
Davis's only biological child was with her third husband, William Grant
Sherry, B.D. Hyman (born Barbara Davis Sherry, named after Davis's
sister). In 1985, Hyman wrote a tell-all
book, My
Mother's Keeper, in which she savaged her mother and Gary Merrill, her adoptive father. Davis admitted that
her career always came first. Although she married four times and had several
affairs, including ones with George Brent and William Wyler, many who knew both her and her
daughter claimed the book was largely fiction and that Davis, although
difficult, was really a loving mother and grandmother. Davis adopted two
children with Merrill: Margot, who was confined to special education schools for most of her
life due to a brain
injury; and Michael, with whom both Davis and Merrill maintained close
relationships throughout their lives. Michael never confirmed nor denied the
claims Hyman made in her book. She currently hosts a weekly half-hour show on
the Christian cable network World Harvest Television.
Davis wrote another book, This 'N' That, in the late 1980s, and
Bette Davis, The Lonely Life, which appeared the year after her death,
updating what had happened since her first biography had been published. She
died on October 6, 1989 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, following a long battle with breast cancer, and after
having suffered several strokes. She is interred in Forest Lawn -
Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. On her
tombstone is written: "She did it the hard way."
Although Davis walked out on her last film, "Wicked Stepmother" was released
after her death in 1989, with her scenes
included. She is also credited with many famous quotes about acting, Hollywood, and rivals like Crawford
and Hepburn.
After the song "Bette Davis Eyes" became a hit in 1981, Davis wrote letters to songwriters Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon, and
singer Kim Carnes, to thank
them and to 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
hit song written about her.
On July 19, 2001, Steven Spielberg purchased Davis's Oscar for
Jezebel at a Christie's auction and returned it to the Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
The actress and singer Bette Midler (born 1945), whose birth name is Bette Davis Midler, is named
after Bette Davis. However, Midler pronounces her first name as one syllable,
not two.
Source:
Wikipedia Encyclopedia
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