"Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night."
It has to be one of the most widely repeated quotes in Hollywood history. How fitting that it was first spoken by Bette Davis, as Margo Channing, in All About Eve.
Bette Davis. The name instantly conjures up images in the minds of moviegoers. She was one of the few American icons that was declared a living legend while she was on the Earth. Cancer ended her life at 81 years on Oct. 6, but her legend lives on.
Davis is remembered as an actress who lived up to the high standards she placed on herself. She was more than a woman with bulging eyes and floundering arms, surrounded by a cloud of cigarette smoke: she took a role and became it.
"She's a great actress with a lot of class," said Liz Cross (senior- art). "Her style of acting was very different from the people of her time. It was very naturalistic. She identified with the character very much, which is something that makes up all great actresses. She's destined to go down in history as the actress she was."
Audiences aren't the only ones who sang her praises. Critics loved her too. This is easily seen in her trophy collection, which includes two Academy Awards and an Emmy, for starters.
"(Davis) refused to be portrayed as a sex goddess and became more of a strong independent woman in a system of Hollywood that didn't want strong independent women," said Philip Lyon (graduate-mass communications). "She is a strong role model for men and women. I think she'll be remembered for that."
But what made her great, and different from the rest, was the way she fought the Tinseltown filmmaking methods when she began her career in the 1930s.
At that time, filmmaking was controlled by the studio system. Roberta Pearson, assistant professor of communications, said the actors were bound by seven-year contracts that were totally controlled by the studio. The studio had the power to break this contract at any time; the actors, however, did not have the same privilege.
There were vast economic tensions woven throughout the studio system. Production had to be regularized in order to fill the studio-owned theatres, Pearson explained: "The studio system is analogous to a factory. It had to turn out a certain number of films a year."
To ensure audiences, the studios would often mold actors into a star image. Through publicity and grooming, the actors would be forced into roles to conform to this image, Pearson said, and Davis was one of the stars that revolted against this stereotyping.
"She had a very vexed relationship with Warners," Pearson said.
Her battles with Warner Brothers were long and innumerable. Davis was forced to make her share of bad movies, but these are masked by the many classic ones. These films have been remade, rereleased, and parodied. If imitation is the finest form of flattery, then these films are obviously larger than life.
Her first truly memorable role is in a film she made after begging Warners to loan her to RKO in 1935. The film was Of Human Bondage, and the role was Mildred Rogers, a waitress who essentially tears the heart out of Philip Carey, a club-footed medical student played by Leslie Howard.
"I hated you," she screamed at Carey in a wild Cockney accent. "It made me sick when I had to let you kiss me. I only did it because you begged me. You hounded me, you drove me crazy, and after you kissed me, I always used to wipe my mouth. Wipe my mouth." As if those kind words weren't enough, she ended her spiel by calling him a cripple.
Audiences were stunned by Mildred, and critics were stunned by Bette. How could this woman who had only played fluff roles steal the picture from Howard? Howard was left behind in the dust from the moment Davis took the role on.
Many people were shocked when Davis wasn't nominated for an Academy Award for Of Human Bondage, and these were the same people who felt that her award for the following year's Dangerous was a consolation prize.
When she received the award from the Academy, Davis noticed that it held a strange resemblance to her husband at that time: Harmon Oscar Nelson. Though the Academy never verified this, she claims to have named the valued "Oscar."
Another widely-known role of hers was Julie Marsden, the Jezebel herself. Davis' Oscar-winning performance as the devil with the red dress on is remembered by worldwide audiences.
Julie is a New Orleans belle, in the truest sense of the word: she is flirtatious, possessive, jealous, and manipulative. When she can't have the love of her life, Pres (played by Henry Fonda), she raises hell, in a nutshell.
From this role on, audiences confirmed her as the grand-dame bitch and loved every minute of it. The movie trailers soon bragged this fact: "No one's as good as Bette when she's bad," read one advertisement for Beyond the Forest.
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Despite this image, two of Davis' most famous films featured her as the suffering heroine. One of these was the socialite who changes her selfish ways after being diagnosed with a brain tumor in Dark Victory; the other was the single parent who can never reveal her identity to her child in The Old Maid.
Another popular film of Davis' is the romance classic Now, Voyager, the film that sprung the widely-imitated cliche of lighting two cigarettes at once. Davis, as Charlotte "Don't let's ask for the moon, we have the stars" Vale, starred opposite Paul Henreid as Jerry Durrance.
But her trademark role has to be Margo Channing in All About Eve. The multi-faceted and complicated character she portrays is truly an example of acting at its finest. The role seems written for her, although she actually received it after two other actresses backed out.
Many industry people think this role was a bit too close to her actual personality; they saw Bette Davis playing Bette Davis. Whether this is true or not does not take away from the quality of the performance. It still is reshown and imitated over and over, most recently parodied in a skit on Saturday Night Live.
Her career went through many ups and downs. All About Eve was her fist major comeback. Her second came 12 years later in 1962, when she starred with Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, Davis' initiation to the horror genre.
Baby Jane was about two aging ex-superstar sisters, living in mutual hate. The film painted a grotesque image of a mentally imbalanced Jane, played by Davis. Shock coursed through the pre-Freddy Kreuger audience. The formula worked for her and she fell into a slump of playing similarly horrifying characters.
With over 80 films completed, Davis performed a wide range of roles including a desperate murderess, Queen Elizabeth (twice), a stuffy, money-hungry businesswoman, a no-nonsense editor of a magazine, and a drunken bag lady. Her last film, 1987's The Whales of August, paired her with her contemporary, Lillian Gish.
In 1985, Davis' born-again Christian daughter, B.D. Hyman, wrote My Mother's Keeper. The book painted an unkind picture of the aging actress. Responding to it, Elaine Melson Madsen wrote in a letter that she didn't want to go to Hyman's heaven:
"I want to go where ever it is Bette Davis ends up because it'll be a helluva lot of fun and it will damn well have some character to it, you can be sure of that."
