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Bette Davis

Bette Davis: Encyclopedia - Bette Davis

This article is about Bette Davis the actress; there is also a singer named Betty Davis. Ruth Elizabeth Davis, better known as Bette Davis (April 5, 1908 – October 6, 1989), was an American actress of stage, screen and television. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Bette Davis was renowned for her intense, forceful persona and artistic versatility during a career that spanned six decades and almost one hundred films. Co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen with John Garfield and one of the most respected d ...

Including:

Bette Davis - The early years

Bette Davis - The ingenue

Bette Davis - The middle years

Bette Davis - The established star

Bette Davis - The later years

Bette Davis - Death

Bette Davis - Academy Awards and nominations

Bette Davis - Filmography

Bette Davis, Bette Davis - Academy Awards and nominations, Bette Davis - Death, Bette Davis - Filmography, Bette Davis - The early years, Bette Davis - The established star, Bette Davis - The ingenue, Bette Davis - The later years, Bette Davis - The middle years

Bette Davis: Encyclopedia - Bette Davis

Bette Davis

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

Ruth Elizabeth Davis, better known as Bette Davis (April 5, 1908 – October 6, 1989), was an American actress of stage, screen and television.

Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Bette Davis was renowned for her intense, forceful persona and artistic versatility during a career that spanned six decades and almost one hundred films. Co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen with 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 Fourth 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 contributed to her status as a gay icon. 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.

Bette Davis - The early years

Davis was born to Harlow Morrell Davis, a descendant of Welsh Puritans, and Ruth Favor, a descendant of Huguenot pioneers. In 1918 Davis' 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 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 classmate Lucille Ball was sent home because she was "too shy"), and became a star pupil.

Bette Davis - The ingenue

Her first professional stage performance was in 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, 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 cynic 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 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.

Bette Davis - The middle years

Bette Davis - The established star

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 role 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 gigolo Peter Lawford and detective Karl Malden. In this updated homage to A Stolen Life (1946), Davis and her Now, Voyager (1942) co-star Paul Henreid were reunited with Henreid directing his former colleague.

Also that year she starred in another great 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. Bette and Joan, by Shaun Considine, entertainingly follows these two major stars' decades of conflicts.

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 Award 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).

Bette Davis - 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 in 1962, Mother Goddam in 1974, and This 'N' That in 1987. Bette Davis, The Lonely Life 1990, was published the year after her death with an update.

Davis' only biological child was with her third husband, William Grant Sherry, B.D. Hyman (born Barbara Davis Sherry, named after Davis' sister). In 1985 B.D. wrote an autobiography, My Mother's Keeper, in which she portrayed her mother and adoptive father, Gary Merrill, as controlling and self-involved. Davis admitted that her career had always come first. Although Bette married four times and had numerous affairs, some who knew Davis and B.D. said that Davis, although difficult, was a loving mother and grandmother. Davis adopted two children with Merrill: Margot, who was institutionalized due to a brain injury; and Michael, who has neither confirmed nor denied his sister's experiences, and maintained close relations with Davis and Merrill. B.D. currently hosts a weekly half-hour show on the Christian cable network World Harvest Television.

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 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.

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.

The actress and singer Bette Midler (born 1945), whose birth name is Bette Davis Midler, is named after Bette Davis. Reportedly, Midler's mother was a Davis fan but had never heard Bette's first name pronounced, and so pronounced her own daughter's name as one syllable.

Bette Davis - Death

Davis 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."