“I think that Bette Davis would probably be burned as a witch if she had lived two or three hundred years ago,” English critic E. Arnot Robertson wrote in 1935. “She gives the curious feeling of being charged with power which can find no ordinary outlet.”
Davis, born 108 years ago today in Lowell, Massachusetts, embraced this myth. Not only was she born near Salem, she entered the world like a witch: “A bolt of lightning hit a tree in front of the house the moment I was born,” she told biographer Charlotte Chandler. The iconoclastic actress went on to fight and win many of the same battles faced by actresses today, from establishing equal pay to maintaining a lengthy career. A woman who refused to conform to what an actress should be ended up not only being one of the best actresses of all time, but a model for what actresses in the future could be.
Davis was the first actor—male or female—to receive 10 Academy Award nominations, winning 2, for Dangerous and Jezebel. She was also the first woman elected to serve as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in 1941. Her tenure, however, was brief: she “resigned in fury” after eight weeks because the board wanted her to “be a figurehead only,” she told her friend and interviewer Whitney Stine in 1978. “Because I was a woman, I had to be controlled,” she said.
As a contract player she fought Warner Bros. in court over her autonomy and the quality of her roles. Although she lost the suit, her roles—and her wages—improved dramatically. She also paved the way for her friend and colleague Olivia de Havilland to win a similar labor suit a few years later. “I was fighting for good directors and good scripts. Literally, that’s all I cared about,” Davis told Dick Cavett in 1971. Her lifelong feud with Joan Crawford is the stuff of Hollywood legend. (“To my credit I have never indulged in physical punches, only verbal punches,” she quipped to Stine.) Davis lived through four broken marriages and a conflict with her biological daughter, B.D. Hyman, who wrote a tell-all memoir, My Mother’s Keeper, which Davis said was as “shattering” to her as was her stroke.
But Davis’s personal life is not what continues to fascinate people 27 years after her death from breast cancer, in 1989, at the age of 81. It is the force of her character as manifest in the variety of legendary roles on-screen that still captivate audiences.
Her best roles constitute a dazzling display of outrageous, egocentric women: from fiery southern belle Julie in Jezebel, who dares to wear a red dress to the New Orleans Cosmos Ball, to Baby Jane Hudson, who grotesquely revives her childhood vaudeville career in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Both films were box-office hits, and for much of her career she was a top-grossing star. She played twins twice (A Stolen Life, Dead Ringer)—because one Bette is not enough. Of playing Queen Elizabeth I, not once but twice, she remarked, “I always felt a great propinquity to the character of Elizabeth. In many ways we were very alike. But the power to roll heads—this she had over me.”
Many of her best scenes are pyrotechnical, from shooting her lover six times until the smoking gun clicks empty in The Letter, to her trademark flouncing and scenery-chomping dialogue in All About Eve (“Fasten your seatbelts—it’s going to be a bumpy night”).
Davis was intense, excessive, camp even. Many critics consider her one of the greatest actresses of all time; others accuse her of overacting. When critic James Agee wrote that in Mr. Skeffington Davis “demonstrates the horrors of egocentricity on a marathonic scale,” he could be equally referring to her life and career as much as her character portrayal.
“I think it’s why women loved her,” Jane Fonda said in a TCM tribute, “because they knew that she was willing to go way out on a ledge, in terms of how she looked. She never played it safe.” She continued, “Just watching Bette Davis on the screen was empowering to women. It was like, this is what’s possible, this is the range and depth that is possible for a woman. Enough already with these one-dimensional women. She expanded our range of possibilities.”
The only actress whose career comes close to that range is Meryl Streep, who was awarded the first lifetime-achievement award by the Bette Davis Foundation. “My first memory of Bette Davis is a powerful image of an image burning on a small screen,” Streep said in a TCM tribute:
“For me Bette Davis stood out from other actresses because of her signal audacity. . . . How Miss Davis defied Warner Bros. in her determination for better scripts and how her career suffered at times for that defiance. But the audacity I’m talking about is the bravery of her work.
“Bette Davis seemed willing, she even had an appetite, for parts that were conventionally unappealing. She changed the requirement that actresses in the movies invariably be likable or attractive. She lifted the veil of appropriate behavior in women to expose what was scary, unexpected, or ugly—in other words, to do what was appropriate for the character.”
Streep concluded, “Along with all the actresses of my generation, I am a direct beneficiary of Bette Davis’s will and determination. Because of her hard-fought achievements, we all had it a little easier.”
Bette Davis never wanted to be the ideal woman—she wanted to be the best. She fought for, won, and proved things that women in the industry are still fighting and struggling for today. “I fought battles for little people who weren’t in a position to stand up for themselves,” she told Stine. “I got a reputation for being difficult—a reputation that still plagues me today. But I wasn’t and I’m not. All I ever wanted—or want now—is professionalism.”
“Indestructible,” was how Davis described herself in an interview with The New York Times in the year of her death. “That’s the word that’s often used. To describe me. Which applies to—what? I suppose it means that I just overcame everything. And I had presented to me quite a few things to overcome. But without things to overcome, you don’t become much of a person. Do you.”
