Bette Davis

Bette Davis

(c) Copyright (2015) by Kathleen Spaltro

All Rights Reserved

Was Bette Davis ever better than in "Now, Voyager" (1942) and "All about Eve" (1950)? Shy, refined, repressed Charlotte Vane could not differ more from histrionic, plainspoken, passionate Margo Channing; yet I like both of these characters, and I like Davis's artistry in portraying each of them. I admire Davis for her range, for she was as much actor as star. I admire as well her ferocious self-discipline and her fearlessness about appearing in ugly guises in films.

Although I had watched many of Davis's performances over the years, I first sensed her great capacity as an actor when she mesmerized me while playing Mildred the waitress in "Of Human Bondage" (1934). Leslie Howard was bad in this movie, but Davis was splendid. I admire most her lack of vanity. After pestering Jack Warner for months to get her the role of the detestable Mildred, Davis insisted on makeup that would accurately show the ravaged face of a poor woman dying of TB.

Well-supported by Sterling Hayden in "The Star" (1952), the middle-aged Davis plays a middle-aged star confronting the death of her career and the emptiness of her vanity. Unlike the woman she plays here, Davis revels in looking bad and old if the part calls for it. And, in "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" (1962), Davis amuses herself and her audience by obviously relishing her own grotesqueness.

Yet she was not a physically ugly person; her beauty was not absent but simply unusual. Look at her metamorphosis as Charlotte Vane from depressed dumpiness into a unique loveliness. Like Jeanne Moreau and Susan Sarandon, Davis had an almost distorted beauty that dominates one's attention far more than more conventional good looks do.

Besides her disregard for physical vanity, Davis showed her courage by often portraying unlikable women. Chilling as the heartless wife in "The Little Foxes" (1941), Davis was even better as the manipulative, lying murderer in "The Letter" (1940). A frustrated, passionate woman in a mismatched marriage who carries on a long secret affair with an attractive man with whom she becomes utterly obsessed and whose rejection she cannot tolerate, Leslie Crosbie shoots her lover as if she is spraying bug killer at a spider.

Davis also excelled in portraying more appealing women. Suffering magnificently in "Dark Victory" (1939), Davis also gives an extremely good performance in "Old Acquaintance" (1943). If Miriam Hopkins seems over the top in this film, you have never had the doubtful pleasure of knowing a histrionic narcissist. I greatly enjoy the scene where Davis finally confronts her "old acquaintance" Hopkins but will not spoil it for anyone who has not seen the film. It will shock you a bit!

An actress to her core, Davis bravely gave everything she had to her roles. Never afraid to look ugly or to be ugly, she drove herself to an extreme. Watching her incandescent Mildred in "Of Human Bondage," I thought to myself that, had Davis's Mildred lived in Salem, Massachusetts in the late 17th century, she surely would have been burned as a witch, for Bette Davis burned a hole in the silver screen in this film.

Driven as she was, Davis was probably “difficult” in private life, but her father had stubbed a cigarette hole in her heart by leaving their family and leaving to Bette the job of taking care of her mother, her sister, and herself. Davis never really healed from this early betrayal. Her work always remained her focus throughout what her autobiography called “The Lonely Life.”

first appeared in The Woodstock Independent