Bette Davis
April 5, 1908 — October 6, 1989
Bette Davis was an American actress regarded as one of the greatest performers in Hollywood history — a technically brilliant, emotionally fearless artist who battled studio executives to play difficult, unsympathetic characters and transformed the possibilities of what women could do on screen, winning two Academy Awards and receiving ten nominations across a career that spanned more than five decades.
The Struggle for Respect
Born Ruth Elizabeth Davis on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts, she studied at John Murray Anderson's Dramatic School in New York and worked in regional theater before signing with Universal Pictures in 1930. The studio initially dismissed her — a screen test left one executive declaring she had "as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville." She moved to Warner Bros. and spent years fighting for good roles, eventually suing the studio in 1936 in a landmark case that she lost but that nonetheless helped loosen the grip studios held over actors. She became one of the few actresses of her era who regularly chose her own projects and publicly challenged the system.
The Golden Performances
Davis won back-to-back Academy Awards for Best Actress for Dangerous (1935) and Jezebel (1938). Her intensity and precision were matched by an extraordinary range: the suffering governess in Now, Voyager (1942), the scheming Margo Channing in Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950), and the grotesque, deranged former child star in Robert Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) — a comeback film that earned her a tenth Oscar nomination at age 54. She was the first woman to receive the AFI Life Achievement Award, in 1977, and her iconic bulging eyes, clipped speech, and cigarette-wielding gestures became one of the most imitated images in cultural history.
Did You Know?
When Bette Davis submitted her name to a Hollywood talent agency in 1926, the submission was accidentally filed under "Betty Davis," a name she corrected but that she sometimes used early in her career. The Academy Award she received for Dangerous in 1936 was widely seen as a makeup award for her loss the previous year for Of Human Bondage — a performance so crushing and viscerally real that many critics still regard it as her finest work. It remains among the most famous case of Oscar voters' regret in the Academy's history.
Feud and Final Years
Davis's fierce public feud with Joan Crawford — most vividly on display during the making of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? and in the years that followed — became one of Hollywood's most legendary enmities, dramatized in the FX series Feud: Bette and Joan (2017), with Susan Sarandon playing Davis. She continued acting into the 1980s, including a memorable performance in The Whales of August (1987), alongside Lillian Gish. She died of breast cancer on October 6, 1989, at age 81. Her line "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night" from All About Eve was voted the fourth greatest movie quote of all time by the AFI.