Bette Davis

Ruth Elizabeth Davis was born on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts, the daughter of Harlow Morrell Davis, a patent attorney, and Ruth Augusta Davis, née Favór, from Tyngsborough, Massachusetts. She had one younger sister, Barbara Harriet, born in 1909. From early childhood she was known as Betty, a spelling she later changed to Bette, after a character in Honoré de Balzac's La Cousine Bette. Following her parents' separation in 1915, Davis and her sister spent three years at a boarding school called Crestalban in Lanesborough, Massachusetts, while their mother relocated to New York City to work as a governess. By the fall of 1921, the family had reunited in a New York City apartment, where their mother enrolled in the Clarence White School of Photography and subsequently worked as a portrait photographer. Davis attended Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts, where she met her future husband, Harmon O. Nelson. In 1926, at age eighteen, she attended a production of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck featuring Blanche Yurka and Peg Entwistle, an experience she later credited as the reason she pursued a career in theater. She auditioned for Eva Le Gallienne's 14th Street theater school but was turned away, and subsequently auditioned for George Cukor's stock company in Rochester, New York, where she received her first paid acting assignment playing a chorus girl in the play Broadway.

Davis made her Broadway debut in 1929 in Broken Dishes, followed by Solid South, both of which drew on her earlier stage work in Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston. Her Broadway career extended from 1929 to 1961 and included productions such as The Night of the Iguana, Company, and The World of Carl Sandburg, among others. At age twenty-two, she left New York for Hollywood to screen test for Universal Studios. Her early films there were unsuccessful, and studio head Carl Laemmle considered releasing her before cinematographer Karl Freund advocated for her casting in Bad Sister (1931), which became her film debut. She joined Warner Bros. in 1932 and achieved a critical breakthrough with her portrayal of a vulgar waitress in Of Human Bondage (1934). Despite widespread recognition for that performance, she was not nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress that year, but won the award the following year for Dangerous (1935).

In 1936, dissatisfied with the film roles she was being offered, Davis attempted to break her studio contract, losing a well-publicized legal case but nonetheless entering the most productive phase of her career. She received praise for Marked Woman (1937) and won a second Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of a strong-willed Southern belle in Jezebel (1938). That win began a streak of five consecutive Best Actress nominations, covering Dark Victory (1939), The Letter (1940), The Little Foxes (1941), and Now, Voyager (1942). After a period of declining prominence in the late 1940s, she returned to critical favor with All About Eve (1950), in which she played a fading Broadway star, a performance frequently cited as the finest of her career. Additional nominations followed for The Star (1952) and, after further career difficulties, for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), in which she played a psychotic former child star named Jane Hudson.

Davis was the first person to accumulate ten Academy Award nominations for acting, including one write-in, and the first woman to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her second on its list of the greatest female stars of classic Hollywood cinema, behind Katharine Hepburn. Beyond film, she remained active in television, leading the miniseries The Dark Secret of Harvest Home (1978) and winning an Emmy Award for Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter (1979). She received Emmy nominations for White Mama (1980) and Little Gloria... Happy at Last (1982). Her final complete film role was in The Whales of August (1987). Davis was also the co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen and served as the first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Married four times, she was once widowed and three times divorced, and raised her children as a single parent. She died on October 6, 1989, from breast cancer, having accumulated more than one hundred film, television, and theater credits across her career.