Audrey Fox
Although Hollywood has always placed a premium on beautiful, fresh-faced women in the bloom of youth, with apples in their cheeks and an innocent smile, film fans often gravitate toward their pricklier counterparts. The grand dames of cinema, these stars – although perhaps more or less pleasant in real life – have a mature, commanding persona on screen that lends itself to high drama. Glenn Close, Cate Blanchett, and Helen Mirren are all prime modern examples of this, often playing characters who are quick with an acerbic putdown that leaves their adversaries stinging for weeks afterward. But these actresses, as wonderful as they are, stand on the shoulders of a classic Hollywood giant: Bette Davis. The master of the withering glare, she wasn’t afraid of being unlikeable on screen, creating heroines who could be mean, insecure, and sharp-tongued, but always captivating.
Although it sometimes seems like Bette Davis was born to be 45 and over everyone’s nonsense, she began her career at the age of 23, teeming with innocence as the shy younger sister of a fallen vixen in Hobert Henley’s 1931 drama Bad Sister. She wasn’t exactly the typical Hollywood starlet – although she was instantly recognizable for her huge, hypnotic eyes (immortalized by Kim Carnes’ 1981 single “Bette Davis Eyes”), notoriously brutal studio executives were unimpressed by her looks. Producer Carl Laemmle Jr allegedly said after seeing Davis in the film, “Can you imagine some poor guy going through hell and high water and ending up with her at the fade-out?” Universal kept her on for a few more films, but none were successful, and she was eventually let go from her contract. After appearing in The Man Who Played God a year later, Davis received positive reviews for the first time in her career, along with a brand new Warner Brothers contract. Finally breaking into the industry in earnest, the young actress was off to the races.
In 1934, Davis took on the lead female role in Of Human Bondage, the cinematic adaptation of W. Somerset Maughan’s classic novel. Her performance as Mildred, the cruel and toxic love interest to Leslie Howard’s Philip Carey, is a window into things to come for the young actress: she’s not afraid to be cruel, she’s not afraid to be ugly, she’s not afraid to make the audience hate her. In 1930s Hollywood, this was about the riskiest thing for a young woman to do. As an up-and-coming star, she was utterly dependent on the audience’s goodwill to ensure future roles. If they didn’t want to watch her anymore, the parts would dry up, and she’d find herself out of a job or typecast as the villainess.
But there’s something about Bette Davis’s performances that engage the viewer, making us like her even when she’s nasty or a complete emotional mess. Her flaws make her human, and she has a sense of vulnerability that prevents her characters from becoming completely irredeemable. Though she didn’t win the Academy Award for her performance in Of Human Bondage, a review in Life Magazine said that she gave “probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress.” But Bette Davis was just getting started.
It was in 1938’s Jezebel that she really came into her own, taking on the kind of role that would define the rest of her career. In it, she plays a southern belle in the 1850s who, in order to get revenge on her fiance, wears a scandalous red dress to an elegant ball where all unmarried women were expected to wear white. This sets off a chain of events that begins with a broken engagement, turns deadly when she incites a duel between her ex-fiance’s brother and a lovesick man she goads into fighting for her, and ends with her redemption as she sacrifices herself to nurse her ex-fiance through a yellow fever epidemic. Released within a year of Gone With the Wind, Jezebel is often overlooked, but it serves as a prime example of Bette Davis’s bread and butter. Spiteful and hot-headed, her character leaves a string of broken lives in its wake. If anything, the biggest flaw in Jezebel is that they felt the need to give her character a redemption arc at all – it may have been more fun to watch Davis’s Julie Marsden unrepentant to the bitter end.
Unlike many classic Hollywood actresses who made their careers playing youthful, cheery ingenues, aging into her 30s and 40s actually offered more scope for her creative talents. In 1939, she shaved off her eyebrows to play the elderly Queen Elizabeth I in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. She reunited with William Wyler to film The Little Foxes in 1941, where she played the scheming Regina Giddens, whose only outlet for ambition as a woman in 1800s society is to maneuver for power within her family, Succession-style. The following year, she took on what is now one of her most famous roles as Charlotte Vale in Now, Voyager, an emotionally abused spinster whose spirit is crushed by her domineering mother until she is utterly transformed by the power of therapy (and a cruise to Brazil, of course). All of these roles speak to what was so unusual about Bette Davis. She was one of the biggest female stars in Hollywood, which would normally mean beauty, glamour, and grace. But throughout her career, she was continually drawn to characters who were outsiders, and who didn’t conform to the expectations of what it meant to be a woman in their time.
The 1940s were undeniably turbulent for Davis. She spent the early years of the decade supporting the war effort, then her husband died in a freak accident in 1943. Her stress and unhappiness led to her developing a reputation on set for being difficult, and some of her projects in the late 1940s were not particularly well-received. But despite these setbacks, she put in the performance of her career in 1950, when she starred in All About Eve as Margo Channing, a middle-aged Broadway actress in conflict with a younger woman who seems poised to steal everything she’s worked for.
Margo is the culmination of Davis’s entire career up to this point, and she is in rare form. She’s witty, caustic, and extremely dramatic, but there’s also an intense vulnerability that runs through the entire performance. Margo can be cruel and self-sabotaging at times, but it’s impossible not to see that she behaves this way because she’s scared and feels threatened. Women are taught that every minute they grow older, they’re getting closer and closer to their best use-by date. There are always younger models waiting in the wings to take over, and her greatest fear is ultimately of being replaced and fading into irrelevance.
Davis took on many roles throughout the 1950s and 1960s that cemented her reputation as standing fearlessly in defiance of female protagonists always being the nice girl. But All About Eve stands head and shoulders above as a singular defining achievement in her career. What we see in this role, and many of her other performances, is that a character’s humanity is more important than their likability. And while male characters are generally allowed to be amoral and have flaws, it’s much rarer for a woman to be afforded the same grace. Bette Davis has resonated with generations of audiences for that reason: she gave us dozens of female characters who were occasionally messy but always felt genuine.
