Bette Davis

Actress

• Born: April 5, 1908
• Birthplace: Lowell, Massachusetts
• Died: October 6, 1989
• Place of death: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

American actor

With a screen persona comprised of equal parts talent, passion, and intelligence, Davis was, at the height of her career, the leading film actress of her generation.

Areas of achievement Film, theater and entertainment

Early Life

Bette Davis (BEH-tee DAY-vihs) was born in the industrial city of Lowell, Massachusetts. Her only sister, Barbara, followed eighteen months later. Her parents, patent attorney Harlow Davis and his wife, Ruth, were divorced several years later. After the divorce, Ruth called “Ruthie” by her children moved to the town of Newton with the girls. The years that followed were sometimes difficult as Ruthie supported her family first as a governess and later as a photographer, and she and her daughters forged strong emotional bonds that would remain the mainstay of her elder daughter’s life even at the height of her Hollywood career.

After adopting the name “Bette” from Honoré de Balzac’s novel La Cousine Bette (1846), Bette Davis decided in her early teens to pursue a career as an actor. Her first taste of the power of acting came during a potentially tragic accident: While she was appearing in a school Christmas pageant, her costume caught fire and she decided on impulse to pretend that she had been blinded. After recovering from her injuries, she began appearing in school plays and attending drama classes.

Following her graduation, Davis went to New York City, where she enrolled as a student at the Robert Milton-John Murray Anderson School of the Theatre. In addition to her acting classes, her studies there included dance classes with the legendary Martha Graham. She soon began appearing in small parts and ingenue roles in regional and summer stock theaters, making her Broadway debut in 1929 in Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. This was followed by a critically acclaimed run in the comedy Broken Dishes (1929) and an unsuccessful screen test for Samuel Goldwyn. She spent another year in stock theater and on Broadway before making a second screen test, this time for Universal. In 1930, she was hired by the studio as a contract player.

Life’s Work

Davis arrived in Los Angeles accompanied by her mother in December of 1930. Hollywood legend has it that the studio representative sent to meet her train returned without her, stating that he had not seen anyone disembarking who looked like an actress. In many ways, the incident set the stage for Davis’s Hollywood career; the unconventional looks and manner that seemed to many to be a handicap in the beginning would become famous throughout the world by the decade’s end, captivating film audiences and setting Davis apart from her peers.

At its inception, however, Davis’s film career seemed headed for failure. Finding Davis lacking in glamour and sex appeal, studio executives insisted that her hair be dyed Jean-Harlow-blond and then cast her in a series of forgettable films. Davis’s debut in Bad Sister (1931), one of several films she would make with Humphrey Bogart, offered little hint of the power and electricity that would mark her later work, and Universal did not renew her contract when it expired. Davis was contemplating a return to New York and the stage when she was hired by Warner Bros. to appear opposite George Arliss in The Man Who Played God (1932). The film established Davis’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s most gifted young actors and was the beginning of her almost twenty-year association with the studio.

As a studio contract player, Davis had no say over the films in which she appeared and soon became disenchanted with the roles that Warner Bros. offered her. Her finest work from this period occurred when she was loaned to RKO studios to appear opposite Leslie Howard in Of Human Bondage (1934). The following year she received her first Academy Award for her performance in Dangerous (1935), and she appeared with both Howard and Bogart in The Petrified Forest in 1936. These roles were the exception, however, to the parts she was usually assigned. In 1936, Davis defied the studio and attempted to break her contract by sailing for England to work with Italian producer Ludovico Toeplitz. The dispute was settled in the studio’s favor by the English courts, however, and Davis returned to Hollywood.

Although she had lost her legal case, the event marked an important turning point in Davis’s career. On her return to Warner Bros., she began to be offered the sorts of roles she had long sought; in 1938, she received her second Oscar for her performance in Jezebel. Over the next decade, Davis reigned as one of Hollywood’s leading actors, earning acclaim for the wide variety of roles she undertook and becoming the yardstick against which other female actors of her generation were measured. She was one of the leading contenders for the coveted role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and she lost her third bid for an Oscar to the actor who eventually won the role, Vivien Leigh.

Davis’s nomination that year came for one of her best-loved films, Dark Victory (1939), in which she plays a spoiled rich girl who finds love only after learning that she is dying of a brain tumor. The film’s plot typified what would come to be known as the “woman’s picture,” and Davis, along with many female actors of the period, found a rich variety of dramatic roles within the genre. The films were characterized by strong female characters who suffered loss, hardship, and heartbreak, often growing in wisdom and spirit through their experiences. In The Old Maid (1939), Davis portrays an unwed mother of the 1860’s struggling to rear her unsuspecting child, while The Great Lie (1941) finds her rearing another woman’s illegitimate child. In All This and Heaven Too (1940), she plays a governess wrongly accused of murdering her employer; in The Letter (1940), she is indeed guilty of the crime, cast as a married woman who shoots her lover. In perhaps the definitive woman’s picture, Now, Voyager (1942), Davis portrays an emotionally disabled never-married woman who blossoms as a result of her affair with a married man and then informally adopts his troubled daughter.

Throughout this period of her career, which also saw her play the central role in the screen adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1941), Davis enjoyed tremendous critical and popular success. She was the first woman to serve as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and would become one of the most-nominated actresses in Oscar history, surpassed only by Katharine Hepburn. Toward the end of the 1940’s, however, Davis once again became dissatisfied with the roles offered to her by the studio, and in 1949 she severed her relationship with Warner Bros.

Davis’s first film prior to leaving the studio proved to be one of her best: the Academy Award-winning All About Eve (1950). Her career throughout the rest of the 1950’s, however, was largely unrewarding, and she returned to the stage in 1961 in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana. The 1960’s brought an unexpected turn in Davis’s career, sparked by her appearance opposite Joan Crawford in the offbeat 1962 horror film, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Davis received her tenth and final Oscar nomination for her role as a deranged former child star who torments her wheelchair-using sister, and the film was the first in a series of gothic thrillers for the actor. The final years of Davis’s career were marked by occasional work in films and on television, increasingly limited by ill health. In 1977, she was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. Her last completed film, The Whales of August (1987), in which she costarred with silent film star Lillian Gish, captured on film the ravages of her battles with cancer and a stroke. It also conveys the fierce, indomitable spirit that characterized her work as a whole and helped make her a legendary figure in Hollywood history. Davis died at her home outside Paris in 1989.

Significance

Davis’s remarkable film career was aided both by her own extraordinary talent and screen presence and by the Hollywood studio system, which depended for its success on the studios’ ability to provide their stars with strong material. Davis’s magnetic screen persona, characterized by intelligence, dramatic power, and an almost ferocious energy, captured the film-going public’s imagination in a series of roles that showcased her talents even as they helped define the genre of the woman’s picture. Despite the sometimes double-edged message that these films held for women, with their stories of heroines ennobled by suffering, they offered images of women who were strong, often resourceful, and always emotionally complex. Davis carved out a place for herself in an industry that initially doubted her ability to hold an audience’s attention, and she did it with uncompromising determination and integrity. Her personal style, her speech, even the way in which she smoked her trademark cigarettes, became an integral part of Hollywood imagery and legend. Talent alone, however, is not enough to secure a place in film history; the greatest stars also share a quality that can only be described as larger than life. To watch Davis on the screen is to watch a performer who seems to define the term.

Bibliography

Chandler, Charlotte. The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis, a Personal Biography. New York: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2006. This biography is based on extensive interviews that Chandler conducted with Davis shortly before her death in 1989 and resembles a conversation in which Davis tells her life story in her own words.

Davis, Bette. The Lonely Life. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962. Davis’s intelligent, highly readable autobiography covers her life and career from her childhood until shortly before her appearance in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Davis, Bette, with Michael Herskowitz. This ’n That. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987. Written near the end of her life, Davis’s second book covers primarily her later years in an entertaining, anecdotal fashion.

Higham, Charles. Bette. New York: Macmillan, 1981. A comprehensive look at Davis’s life and career, this biography includes behind-the-scenes stories of both a personal and professional nature.

Hyman, B. D. My Mother’s Keeper. New York: William Morrow, 1985. Davis’s daughter, Barbara Davis Hyman, presents a no-holds-barred account of her relationship with her mother and the stormy contest of wills that eventually led to their bitter estrangement. Although far from balanced in its treatment of Davis, this biography presents important insights into her private life.

Leaming, Barbara. Bette Davis. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2003. Leaming uses newly released material to create this sympathetic yet frank profile of Davis.

Moseley, Roy. Bette Davis. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. Moseley recounts his fifteen-year friendship with Davis.

Ringgold, Gene. The Films of Bette Davis. New York: Bonanza Books, 1966. This chronological look at each of Davis’s films up to The Nanny includes cast, credits, a synopsis, and excerpted reviews.

Stine, Whitney.“I’d Love to Kiss You . . .” Conversations with Bette Davis. New York: Pocket Books, 1990. As its title suggests, this book contains a series of conversations the author had with Davis during the final decades of Davis’s life.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Mother Goddam. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1974. Stine’s detailed examination of Davis’s career contains highlighted passages by Davis, who offers a running commentary throughout the book.

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