Bette Davis

Bette Davis, born Ruth Elizabeth Davis on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts, was an American actress of film, television, and theater. She became one of the defining figures of classic Hollywood cinema, admired for a forceful, intense acting style and for her readiness to play women who were sardonic, difficult, or unsympathetic. Across more than 100 roles, she moved through contemporary crime melodramas, historical and period films, occasional comedies, and, most successfully, romantic dramas.

Her early life was marked by change and hard work. After her parents separated in 1915, Davis and her sister Barbara spent three years at a spartan boarding school in Massachusetts while their mother moved to New York City and worked as a governess. Later, her mother trained at the Clarence White School of Photography and became a portrait photographer. Davis, known as “Betty” in childhood, changed the spelling of her first name to Bette after a character in Honoré de Balzac’s La Cousine Bette. Her desire to act sharpened in 1926, when she saw Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck with Blanche Yurka and Peg Entwistle. She later said Entwistle was the reason she wanted to go into theater.

After Broadway work, Davis moved to Hollywood in 1930. Her first films for Universal Studios did not succeed, but she joined Warner Bros. in 1932 and broke through with her performance as a vulgar waitress in Of Human Bondage in 1934. The next year she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Dangerous. In 1936, frustrated by poor film offers, she tried to free herself from her contract. She lost the public legal case, yet the years that followed became the most successful stretch of her career.

From the late 1930s into the 1940s, Davis was one of American cinema’s most celebrated leading ladies. She was praised for Marked Woman in 1937 and won a second Best Actress Oscar for playing a strong-willed 1850s Southern belle in Jezebel in 1938. That film began five consecutive years of Best Actress nominations, followed by Dark Victory, The Letter, The Little Foxes, and Now, Voyager. After a decline in the late 1940s, she returned strongly as a fading Broadway star in All About Eve in 1950, often cited as her best performance.

Davis’s later career included another Best Actress nomination for The Star in 1952 and her final nomination for playing Jane Hudson in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? in 1962. She took character parts in films such as Death on the Nile and shifted more toward television, leading The Dark Secret of Harvest Home in 1978 and winning an Emmy Award for Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter in 1979. Her last complete film role was in The Whales of August in 1987.

Off screen, Davis was known as a perfectionist, often combative with studio executives, directors, and co-stars. Her clipped voice, forthright manner, and ever-present cigarette became part of a public image that was widely imitated. She co-founded the Hollywood Canteen and became the first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Married four times, once widowed and three times divorced, she raised her children as a single parent and later acknowledged that success often came at the expense of personal relationships. She died of breast cancer on October 6, 1989, after years of ill health, having continued to act until shortly before her death. Her words still draw interest because they seem to come from the same place as her performances: direct, unsparing, and fully awake to the cost of ambition.