In 1934, Davis took on the lead female role in Of Human Bondage<\/em>, the cinematic adaptation of W. Somerset Maughan\u2019s classic novel. Her performance as Mildred, the cruel and toxic love interest to Leslie Howard\u2019s Philip Carey, is a window into things to come for the young actress: she\u2019s not afraid to be cruel, she\u2019s not afraid to be ugly, she\u2019s 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\u2019s goodwill to ensure future roles. If they didn\u2019t want to watch her anymore, the parts would dry up, and she\u2019d find herself out of a job or typecast as the villainess. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But there\u2019s something about Bette Davis\u2019s performances that engage the viewer, making us like her even when she\u2019s 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\u2019t win the Academy Award for her performance in Of Human Bondage<\/em>, a review in Life<\/em> Magazine<\/a> said that she gave \u201cprobably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress.\u201d But Bette Davis was just getting started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was in 1938\u2019s Jezebel <\/em>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\u2019s 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<\/em>, Jezebel<\/em> is often overlooked, but it serves as a prime example of Bette Davis\u2019s 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 <\/em>is that they felt the need to give her character a redemption arc at all \u2013 it may have been more fun to watch Davis\u2019s Julie Marsden unrepentant to the bitter end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a><\/em> as Margo Channing, a middle-aged Broadway actress in conflict with a younger woman who seems poised to steal everything she\u2019s worked for.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Margo is the culmination of Davis\u2019s entire career up to this point, and she is in rare form. She\u2019s witty, caustic, and extremely dramatic, but there\u2019s also an intense vulnerability that runs through the entire performance. Margo can be cruel and self-sabotaging at times, but it\u2019s impossible not to see that she behaves this way because she\u2019s scared and feels threatened. Women are taught that every minute they grow older, they\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em> 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\u2019s humanity is more important than their likability. And while male characters are generally allowed to be amoral and have flaws, it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A valentine to the one and only Bette Davis, born on this very day 115 years ago. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":566,"featured_media":19941,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1422],"class_list":["post-19939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19939"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21751,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19939\/revisions\/21751"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/jezebel-1024x576.jpg\")
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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<\/em>. She reunited with William Wyler to film The Little Foxes<\/em> 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<\/em>-style. The following year, she took on what is now one of her most famous roles as Charlotte Vale in Now, Voyager<\/em>, 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\u2019t conform to the expectations of what it meant to be a woman in their time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n