Bette Davis - First Lady of the American Screen 1908-1989

Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.
—BETTE DAVIS

She has often been referred to as the First Lady of the American Screen. In a career that spanned six decades, Bette Davis was a strong, independent actress in an industry dominated by men. Immediately recognized by her strong, terse voice, Davis took on a multitude of difficult and assertive roles. Her battles with studio bosses were legendary. Yet through it all, Davis maintained a star appeal and longevity in an industry few can match.
The actress, who appeared in more than one hundred films, was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her father, Harlow, and her mother, Ruth, divorced in 1916, leaving young Ruth and her sister, Barbara, to be raised by their mother. Though her early interest was in dance, Ruth quickly turned her attention to acting once she discovered the stage in her freshman year in high school.
Upon graduation, Davis headed to New York, where she applied to the Eva LeGallienne Manhattan Civic Repertory Company. Judged not very serious about an acting career, Ruth’s application was rejected. Undaunted, she instead enrolled in the John Murray Anderson Dramatic School. Her classmates, including a young redhead named Lucille Ball, thought Davis was remarkable.
After working in summer stock at the Lyceum Theater in Rochestet, New York, with director George Cukor in 1928, Davis went directly to Broadway, starring in Broken Dishes and Solid South. She made a screen test for Universal Pictures and in 1930 headed to Hollywood as a contract actress. Davis had a dismal start in Hollywood. Upon her arrival at the train station in Los Angeles, the studio rep sent to meet her left without her because he didn’t see anyone who looked like a movie star.
Davis didn’t exactly set the film world on fire in her 1931 film debut, Bad Sister. A few more film appearances left studio executives unimpressed, and Davis’s contract was not renewed. Undaunted, Davis got a call from Warner Brothers Studios and signed a seven-year contract. She turned in a strong performance in the 1932 film The Man Who Played God, but roles in Warner Brothers films were inconsistent. While she was on loan to RKO to appear in Of Human. Bondage (1934), Davis gave her career breakthrough performance. She received a number of Academy Award write-in votes for her role in Bondage.
Her next film for Warner Brothers brought Davis the success she sought. In Dangerous (1935), Davis turned in a fantastic performance as the self-destructive actress Joyce Heath, Though Davis won the coveted golden statuette for the film, she continued to be cast in unsatisfactory roles. Daring to buck the mega-studio, Davis went to England to make films. The studio sued her, and she was forced to honor her contract.
Davis’s act of defiance was enough to prod Warner’s to offer the award-winning actress better roles. Their renewed partnership resulted in one of the most prolific periods in Davis s career. Her string of memorable roles started with her performance as the willful Southern belle Julie Marsdcn in the Civil

War-era film Jezebel (1938). Many agree that Davis’s portrayal of Marsden comes closest to rivaling that of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind (2. role that almost went to Davis).
Nominated again for Best Actress, Davis walked away with her second Oscar in three years. Davis would never win another Academy Award, but she achieved four more of her remarkable ten Oscar nominations in the war-torn decade of the 1940s, including those for her roles as a timid spinster turned vibrant woman in Now, Voyager (1942) and as a spoiled socialite in Mr. Skejfington (1944).
Davis was among the many stars that contributed to the war effort during World War II. Turning an abandoned nightclub into a place where soldiers could enjoy an evening’s entertainment, she helped to organize the Hollywood Canteen. In recognition of her contribution, Davis was awarded the Distinguished Civilian Service Medal in 1980, the highest civilian honor awarded by the United States Department of Defense.
Though her career began to take a downturn with mediocre roles in films after the war, Davis bounced back in 1950 with perhaps the role of a lifetime in Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. Playing the stormy Broadway star Margo Channing, Davis gave audiences an intentionally cynical view of people in the theater. It is in All About Eve that Davis utters her most memorable line, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.”
Being a strong-willed, independent woman, Davis developed a reputation for being difficult. Though she never recouped the superstar status she attained in the 1940s, she was constantly reinventing herself. And she often did so while dealing with several serious health problems. In the 1950s Davis suffered from a bone disease that required part of her jawbone to be removed.
In 1962 Davis returned to top form in the dark drama What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. Playing a demented aging actress who tortures her wheelchair-bound sister (played by Joan Crawford), Davis earned her tenth Academy Award nomination. Thus began a new career m horror films. She also found welcome opportunities to work in television, winning rwo Emmy Awards for her roles \nMrs. Lincoln (1954) and Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter (1979). In 1987 Davis was named a Kennedy Center Honoree.
The list of Davis’s credits and honors is almost as long as the list of her performance appearances. She was the first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (1941) and the first female recipient of the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award (1977). In 1980, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of her career, Davis starred in her eighty-fifth film, The Watcher in the Woods.
Despite suffering a stroke and a mastectomy due to breast cancer in 1 983, Davis remained active. She wrote an autobiography entitled This ‘n That during her recovery, and returned to acting. She appeared in the critically acclaimed TV movie Murder with Mirrors and made her final film in 1987 in The Whales of August.
Davis’s personal life was as intense as her career. She always put her film career first but managed to marry four times, giving birth to a daughter, Barbara Davis Hyman, and adopting two more children, Margot and Michael. She died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, on October 6, 1989. In true Bette Davis style, her tombstone reads, “She did it the hard way.”

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