Bette Davis

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

After appearing in Broadway productions, Davis moved to Hollywood where she appeared in several films for Universal Studios, until she was signed to a contract by Warner Brothers. A well publicised 1937 legal case, in which Davis attempted to free herself from the restraints of her contract failed, but over the following decade she established herself as one of the most notable and praised film actresses of her day. She was highly regarded for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical biographies and she occasionally acted in comedies. Her greatest successes were in romantic dramas, often described derisively as "women's pictures", a term Davis detested.

Known for her forceful and often intense dramatic performances, Davis was recognised for her willingness to play unsympathetic and unglamorous characters. She gained a reputation as a perfectionist who could be highly combative, and her confrontations with studio executives, film directors and costars were often reported. Her career went into decline during the 1950s, although she continued to appear in films and television. During the 1960s she played in several horror films, and over the course of the next two decades, also appeared in numerous television movies.

Co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen and the first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Davis maintained a high profile as a respected figure within the Hollywood community, earning eleven Academy Award nominations, and becoming the first woman to receive a "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the American Film Institute. Davis's strong persona, her clipped vocal style and ubiquitous cigarette contributed to her image as a film personality and her distinctive style has been imitated and satirised. Outspoken and direct, she was also known for her witty and sometimes biting comments about Hollywood, her costars and herself. A highly ambitious personality, she readily admitted, in her later years, that her career had been her first priority, and that her personal life had been turbulent; married four times, she was once widowed and thrice divorced, and raised her children as a single parent. Her final years were marred by a long period of ill health, however she continued acting until shortly before her death from cancer, with more than one hundred film and television roles to her credit.

Early years

Ruth Elizabeth Davis was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to Harlow Morrell Davis, a descendant of Welsh Puritans, and Ruth Favor, a descendant of Huguenot and upper-class English pioneers (^*). In 1918 Davis' father abandoned the family, 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, before enrolling in John Murray Anderson's dramatic school, where she excelled.

The ingenue

After unsuccessfully replacing Linda Watkins in the Broadway revival of The Wild Duck, Davis officially her first professional stage performance was in the 1928 Off-Broadway production, The Earth Between, and the following year made her Broadway debut in the comedy Broken Dishes. She also appeared in the play, Solid South.

After receiving some positive reviews she was hired by Universal Studios to appear in the film, Strictly Dishonourable, and arrived in Hollywood on December 13, 1930. The studio executives were not impressed by her, and rejected Davis for the role in favour of Sidney Fox. A screen test was arranged for the film A House Divided and Davis recalled being hastily dressed in an ill-fitting costume with a low neckline, only to be rebuffed by the director, William Wyler, who loudly commented, "What do you think of these dames who show their chests and think they can get jobs?". Helen Chandler ultimately won the part. Davis then secured a her film debut role in The Bad Sister, starring Sidney Fox. The film's producer Carl Laemmle Jr. was hostile towards Davis, who recalled overhearing his comment that she "has about as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville", one of the film's co-stars. The film was not a success, and Davis' next role in Seed was too brief to attract attention. Sidney Fox was given a role previously assigned to Davis in the The Murders in the Rue Morgue, while Universal Studios considered Davis's contract. Stine, Whitney, with running commentary by Bette Davis. Mother Goddam: The Story of the Career of Bette Davis. 1974. W. H. Allen and Co Plc. ISBN 1569801576.

Davis refused a suggestion that she be renamed "Bettina Dawes" saying that she would never be known by a name that sounded like "Between the Drawers". Universal Studios renewed her contract for three months, and she appeared in Waterloo Bridge, before being loaned to Columbia Pictures to appear in The Feathered Serpent and The Menace, and Capital Films to appear in Hell's House. After a nine month stint, Davis had appeared in six films, but none of them were successful and Laemmle elected not to renew her contract.

Until the end of Davis' life she would credit George Arliss, with personally insisting upon her as his leading lady in The Man Who Played God, giving her a chance to show her mettle. More moderately successful movies followed, but the role of the vicious, slatternly, and mentally disturbed Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage (1934) earned Davis major critical acclaim. She had been warned against the part by Jack Warner, who told her that she'd never live it down and refused to lend her out to RKO Pictures. Davis, meanwhile, worried that without it she would be doomed to the second-rate films she was currently acting in. In her memoirs, she accused Warner of being petty and sarcastically suggested that he needed her "for such historic milestones as The Big Shakedown and The Man with the Black Hat." Spada, James: More Than a Woman: An Intimate Biography of Bette Davis. Bantam Books, 1993. ISBN 0553095129
After months of argument, Warner relented and exchanged Davis to RKO for Irene Dunne.

To prepare for the part of Mildred, who was to speak in a Cockney accent, Davis hired an Englishwoman as an assistant. Her constant practice apparently annoyed her family a good deal, so much so that when she slipped into the accent in bed one night, then-husband Harmon O. Nelson, Jr. left the house.

The Motion Picture Academy did not nominate Davis for her tour de force, which prompted write-in votes from disgruntled Academy members. The following year she won the award for Dangerous, although Davis maintained that the award was belated recognition for Of Human Bondage, as she did not regard Dangerous as a particularly good film.

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).

By 1938 she was Warner Brothers most successful actress, and she won a second Academy Award for the romantic melodrama Jezebel (1938), directed by William Wyler, with whom she was rumored to be having an affair. Davis portrayed a hot-headed, selfish Southern woman who proved courageous when her former boyfriend (played by Henry Fonda) falls ill with yellow fever. While Jezebel was being filmed, Davis's father died suddenly from a heart attack, and Davis decided that rather than force the production to cease, she would not attend his funeral, later describing her guilt in her autobiography. She also starred in the popular film, Dark Victory, and earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance in the film, which she later recalled as one of her personal favourites.

Middle years

Established star

Davis was elected the ninth president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, serving 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 confident 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 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 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.

Contrary to Hollywood legend asserting that Davis and Crawford engaged in a bitter fued during filming, Robert Aldrich commented that both actresses understood that their careers were at a crossroads and that the film may prove to be an important one for each of them, and therefore behaved with professional courtesty during filming. While touring the television talk-show circuit to promote the film, Davis told one interviewer that when she and Crawford were first suggested for the leads, Warner studio head Jack Warner replied: "I wouldn't give a plugged nickel for either of those two old broads." Recalling the story, Davis laughed at her own expense, but the following day, she reportedly received a telegram from Crawford: "In future, please do not refer to me as an old broad!" The ill feeling developed into a lifelong enmity when Crawford actively campaigned against Davis when the latter was nominated for an Academy Award. For the remainder of her life, Davis criticised Crawford for her behaviour.

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 (a book written by Shaun Considine) discusses these two major stars' decades of conflict and dislike.

While she appeared in The Nanny (1965), The Anniversary (1967), Bunny O'Hare (1971), Burnt Offerings (1976), Death on the Nile(1978) and starring in two Disney movies Return from Witch Mountain (1978) and The Watcher in the Woods (1980), Davis spent most of the remainder of her career working in television productions. She appeared in The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978), as the mysterious and almost omniscient "Widow Fortune" in a small insular village in Connecticut.

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 Barbara Carrera as her magical incarnation. She died of cancer, aged 81, in France that same year.

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).

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. 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, both of which Davis denied.

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. B.D. earned a $100,000 royalty for publishing the book. Shortly before B.D. started writing the book, Davis underwent surgery for breast cancer and also suffered a stroke. Davis bitterly said, "B.D. thought I was going to die. That's why she wrote the book." Bette however lived to see the book published. Friends and family of Davis said she was heartbroken about the book, and Davis disowned her daughter.

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. B.D. and her husband were completely dependent on Davis financially for many years. 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. Michael has repeatedly said how unhappy he was that his sister chose to publish the book, and that Davis was a loving mother. In "Stardust," a recent documentary about Bette Davis, Michael Merrill recalls begging his sister not to publish the book.

Davis was also extremely generous to her mother and sister, Barbara, supporting them financially throughout their lives.

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.

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 referenced in Bob Dylan's song "Desolation Row" and in the Madonna hit "Vogue" with the line "Bette Davis we love you".

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".

Academy Awards and nominations

Bette Davis had 11 nominations for the Best Actress Oscar. This was a record for Best Actress or Best Actor category, until Katharine Hepburn went on to achieve 12 Best Actress nominations. However Meryl Streep has the overall record of 13 nominations in acting categories (10 for Best Actress and 3 for Best Supporting Actress).

1962: Nominated for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
1952: Nominated for The Star
1950: Nominated for All About Eve
1944: Nominated for Mr. Skeffington
1942: Nominated for Now, Voyager
1941: Nominated for The Little Foxes
1940: Nominated for The Letter
1939: Nominated for Dark Victory
1938: Won for Jezebel
1935: Won for Dangerous
1934: Nominated for Of Human Bondage (Write-in Nomination)

Romantic life

Davis was married four times and had numerous affairs. Her favorite conversational topic was work; her second was men, she told Charlotte Chandler, who wrote her biography "The Girl Who Walked Alone."

During her first six-year marriage with bandleader Harmon Nelson, she had an affair with Howard Hughes. They pair divorced in December 6, 1938 with Nelson citing "cruel and inhuman treatment," saying that she put her career over their marriage.

One of her most significant affairs was with director William Wyler, whom she first met in 1931 during a screen test. Their first collaboration was Jezebel. "He's the most exciting man I'd ever known," she told Chandler (Vanity Fair 03/2006). After completing Jezebel, Davis had become pregnant. She aborted the baby without telling Wyler. She fantasized about Wyler proposing to her, but she ended up hearing of his marriage to Margaret Tallichet over the radio. "Willie was the love of my life. No question. I've always wished I'd married him," she told Chandler. Wyler told Chandler that he remembered that Davis had told him she didn't want to marry again, and he believed her. He also said she was too emotional for him.

Her second husband was Arthur Austin Farnsworth, an assistant manager of an inn Davis frequented in New Hampshire after finishing The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. The marriage lasted about two years until Farnsworth's sudden death.

Her next husband was the artist William Grant Sherry, whom she had met at Laguna Beach party in October 1945. She had her first and only (non-adopted) child, Barbara Davis Sherry, with him.

Her fourth husband was actor Gary Merrill. It was at his rented Malibu house that she conducted her affairs with billionaire Howard Hughes. She told author Chandler, "You know, I was the only one who ever brought Howard Hughes to a sexual climax, or so he said at that time. It's true. That is to say, it's true that he said it. Or let's say I believed it when he told me that...it may have been his regular seduction gambit...But Howard Huge he was not."

She also had an affair with the actor George Brent with whom she appeared in several films.

References

External links

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