Belle Davis
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Best films:
Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) Robert Aldrich's b>Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964) William Wyler's Jezebel (1938) Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950) Frank Capra's Pocketful of Miracles (1961) John Huston's In This Our Life (1942) Anatole Litvak's All This and Heaven Too (1940) William Wyler's The Letter (1940) John Cromwell's Of Human Bondage (1934) Lloyd Bacon's Marked Woman (1937) William Wyler's The Little Foxes (1941) Irving Rapper's Now Voyager (1942) Vincent Sherman's Mr Skeffington (1944) Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory (1939) | Links: |
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Born in 1908 in Massachusetts, Bette Davis was sent to boarding schools by divorced parents. She went into theater without formal training and played on Broadway at the age of 21 in two plays:
"Broken Dishes" (1929) and "Solid South" (1930), in the latter playing a southern belle.
The following year she moved to Hollywood with her mother.
She debuted in Karl Freund's Bad Sister (1931), which also debuted Humphrey Bogat,
and had a minor role in John Adolfi's The Man Who Played God (1932),
but her low sex appeal didn't make her a darling of Hollywood.
She found her niche in playing unsympathetic characters that most divas wouldn't want:
the vicious waitress of John Cromwell's Of Human Bondage (1934), an adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel in which she played a despicable
and manipulative seductress who ends up dying a poor prostitute,
the unstable actress of Alfred Green's Dangerous (1935),
the prostitute of Lloyd Bacon's gangster movie Marked Woman (1937),
the rich and spoiled southern belle of William Wyler's Jezebel (1938),
who finally redeems herself by following her real love to a leper camp where most likely she'll die of a horrible disease,
the socialite of Edmund Goulding's Dark Victory (1939),
the aging queen of
Michael Curtiz's
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939),
the single mother of The Old Maid (1939),
the unfaithful murderess of William Wyler's The Letter (1940),
the spinster governess of Anatole Litvak's All This and Heaven Too (1940),
the greedy and scheming monster of William Wyler's The Little Foxes (1941) , who watches her husband die so she can inherit his wealth and pay her debts,
the unloved spinster of Irving Rapper's Now Voyager (1942), a meditation on female loneliness,
the demonic and selfish woman of John Huston's In This Our Life (1942), who steals her sister's husband, causes his suicide, kills a child while driving drunk, cowardly accuses a black man of the accident, and finally dies fleeing the police,
and
the adulteress of Vincent Sherman's Mr Skeffington (1944).
After World War II she was less in demand and her career declined, forcing her
to return to Broadway's theaters (and for a few years she was just a housewife), but she proved to be one
of the world's greatest (if mannerist) actresses when she played
the fading Broadway star of Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950),
the alcoholic peddler of
Frank Capra's Pocketful of Miracles (1961),
and especially
the madwomen of
Robert Aldrich's
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte (1964).
At a time when Hollywood presented women as glamorous objects to be emulated and worshipped (in fashion, attitude, lifestyle and language), she represented a kind of tough and asexual independent woman who was both the victim and the persecutor, alternatively highlighting the negative and the positive aspects of independence. Her image promoted instead simple lifestyle and attire. After all she was neither beautiful nor elegant. At the core her acting emanated a persona that was not necessarily intelligent but necessarily strong-minded, strong-willed, resilient, self-confident, self-reliant, self-disciplined and even self-possessed. The women of her time could rarely afford those attributes, but they probably subconsciously desired them, and the men of her time were probably subconsciously alarmed by them. In a sense, she was not "consumed" by the audience: she consumed the audience. She was the rare actress who was also an "auteur". She was the subject of Kim Carnes's hit song Bette Davis Eyes (1981), which came out during a revival of sorts. She had two more important roles in Lindsay Anderson's The Whales of August (1987) and Larry Cohen's Wicked Stepmother (1989). Her career is a gallery (or maybe an orgy) of arduous and penetrating characterizations of complex and morbid characters. Masterful interpreter of selfishness and loneliness, she excelled above all in describing miserable lives that inevitably lead to tragedy. Her interpretations constitute a separate chapter in the history of film acting. (My original Italian when she died: Magistrale interprete dell'egoismo e della solitudine, lei eccelse soprattutto nel descrivere vite sbagliate che conducono inevitabilmente alla tragedia. Le sue interpretazioni costituiscono un capitolo a parte nella storia della recitazione cinematografica.) She died in France in 1989. She is a candidate for greatest actress of all time.
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