Bette Davis

Ruth Elizabeth Davis was born on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts, the elder of two daughters of Harlow Morrell Davis, a patent attorney, and Ruth Favor Davis ^[1]. Her parents separated when she was young, and her mother raised Bette and her sister Barbara largely on her own, working as a portrait photographer to keep the household afloat. The family moved often around New England and New York, and the childhood instability left Davis with a lifelong drive to control her own circumstances.

She attended Cushing Academy, a boarding school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, where she met Harmon Nelson, the man who would later become her first husband ^[1]. After seeing a production of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck as a teenager, she decided on a stage career. She adopted the spelling "Bette," reportedly inspired by Honoré de Balzac's novel La Cousine Bette, and enrolled at the John Murray Anderson School of the Theatre in New York after being rejected by Eva Le Gallienne's more prestigious company ^[2].

Her early stage work included seasons with George Cukor's stock company in Rochester, New York, and appearances with the Provincetown Players. In 1929 she reached Broadway in the comedy Broken Dishes, a modest success that brought her to the attention of Hollywood talent scouts ^[2].

Davis arrived in Hollywood in 1930 under contract to Universal Pictures, which had little idea what to do with her. Studio executives considered her insufficiently glamorous, and her debut film, Bad Sister (1931), made no impression ^[2]. Universal let her contract lapse, and she was preparing to return to New York when the English actor George Arliss chose her to play opposite him in The Man Who Played God (1932) at Warner Bros. The role earned her a long-term contract with the studio that would define, and frustrate, the rest of her career ^[1].

Her breakthrough came on loan to RKO in Of Human Bondage (1934), an adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's novel in which she played Mildred, a cruel and slatternly waitress. Critics were startled by the rawness of the performance, and the Academy's failure to nominate her prompted a write-in campaign ^[3]. The following year she won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for Dangerous (1935), a prize many observers read partly as compensation for the earlier omission ^[1].

Dissatisfied with the routine parts Warner Bros. kept assigning her, Davis refused a role in 1936, sailed to England to make films outside her contract, and was sued by the studio. She lost the case in a London court, but the fight changed her standing: Warner Bros. paid her legal costs and began offering her stronger material ^[3]. The episode became a landmark in the long struggle between stars and the studio system, foreshadowing Olivia de Havilland's more successful suit a decade later.

The years from 1938 to 1946 marked the peak of her power at Warner Bros. She won her second Oscar for Jezebel (1938), playing a headstrong Southern belle opposite Henry Fonda, and followed it with a run of performances that made her the studio's most valuable dramatic asset: Dark Victory (1939), The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), and Now, Voyager (1942) among them ^[1]. Between 1938 and 1942 she was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar five years in a row, a streak that anchored her eventual total of ten nominations ^[4].

Among the most cited Bette Davis facts is her record with the Academy: her ten Best Actress nominations stood as the all-time high until Katharine Hepburn and later Meryl Streep surpassed the mark ^[4]. In 1941 she became the first woman elected president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, though she resigned within weeks after clashing with the board over her plans for the organization ^[3].

During the Second World War she co-founded the Hollywood Canteen with John Garfield in 1942, a club where servicemen passing through Los Angeles were entertained and served by film industry volunteers. She later called the Canteen one of the accomplishments she was proudest of, and the Defense Department recognized her wartime work ^[5]. Any honest account of Bette Davis achievements has to weigh this civic effort alongside the performances.

After her Warner contract ended in 1949 her career sagged, then revived spectacularly with All About Eve (1950). As Margo Channing, an aging Broadway star confronting a scheming understudy, Davis delivered what many critics regard as her finest performance, earning another Oscar nomination and a share of the Cannes prize for the film's ensemble ^[2].

Davis married four times. Her first husband was Harmon Nelson, the bandleader she had met at Cushing Academy; they wed in 1932 and divorced in 1938 ^[1]. A brief marriage to Arthur Farnsworth ended with his sudden death in 1943. Her third marriage, to William Grant Sherry in 1945, produced her only biological child, Barbara Davis Sherry, known as B.D. In 1950 she married her All About Eve co-star Gary Merrill; the couple adopted two children, Margot and Michael, before divorcing in 1960 ^[2].

Her combative reputation was not confined to the courtroom or the studio floor. Her decades-long rivalry with Joan Crawford, which reached its strange culmination when the two aging stars appeared together in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), became one of Hollywood's most retold feuds and later the subject of the television series Feud (2017) ^[6].

In 1985 her daughter B.D. Hyman published My Mother's Keeper, a memoir portraying Davis as a domineering and abusive parent. Davis, then recovering from a stroke, was devastated by the book and answered it in her own 1987 volume This 'n That; mother and daughter never reconciled ^[6]. Davis wrote several autobiographical books in all, beginning with The Lonely Life in 1962, a candid account that did much to fix her public image as a survivor who gave no quarter ^[5].

The 1960s brought Davis an unlikely second act in Gothic horror. What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a box office sensation and brought her a tenth and final Oscar nomination; she followed it with Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) and other thrillers that traded on her willingness to look grotesque on screen ^[2]. She also worked steadily in television, and in 1979 she won an Emmy Award for the television film Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter ^[4].

Honors accumulated in her final two decades. In 1977 the American Film Institute made her the first woman to receive its Life Achievement Award, and in 1987 she was among the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors ^[4]. A curious piece of pop culture immortality arrived in 1981 when Kim Carnes's song "Bette Davis Eyes" topped the American charts for nine weeks; Davis wrote to the songwriters to thank them for making her a hero to her grandson ^[6].

Her health failed badly in 1983, when she underwent a mastectomy for breast cancer and suffered strokes within weeks of the surgery. She fought her way back to work regardless, appearing in The Whales of August (1987) opposite Lillian Gish. Davis died of breast cancer on October 6, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris, while returning from the San Sebastián film festival in Spain, where she had accepted an award ^[1]. She was 81. She is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills, and her tombstone carries the epitaph she chose: "She did it the hard way" ^[5].

Any Bette Davis biography ultimately turns on a single argument: that acting, not glamour, could carry a film career. Davis proved it across more than 100 film and television roles in nearly six decades. She took parts other stars refused, played murderers, spinsters, and monsters, and insisted that an unsympathetic character honestly rendered served an audience better than a flattering one ^[2]. Directors and critics have credited her with expanding the emotional range permitted to women on the American screen.

Her influence on later generations of actresses is widely acknowledged. Performers from Meryl Streep to Jodie Foster have cited her example, and the American Film Institute ranked her second among the greatest female stars of classic American cinema in its 1999 list, behind only Katharine Hepburn ^[4]. Her legal battle with Warner Bros., though lost, is remembered as an early strike against the studio contract system that bound performers to material they had no power to refuse ^[3].

Davis's papers are held at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, and the Bette Davis Foundation, established after her death, awards scholarships to promising young actors ^[5]. In 2008 the United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp marking the centenary of her birth. Decades after her death, All About Eve, Jezebel, and Now, Voyager remain fixtures of repertory programming, and her clipped, unmistakable delivery is still among the most imitated voices in film history ^[6].