It’s going to be a bumpy night

My favorite historical figure is Bette Davis. She was not only a great actress but a strong woman who didn’t take any crap, even from the studio heads. She was a woman who knew her worth, and in those days, it earned her a reputation for being difficult.

The roles she played all had one thing in common, female bravery, it was the bravery to play an unlikable character, like in the 1934 film, Of Human Bondage, where she played a prostitute who died of consumption so convincingly that , when her name was not included among the nominees for the best actress category, thousands of fans wrote in demanding she be nominated and the academy aquieced ,allowing her to be a write in nominee. Even though she didn’t win that year, it was the first time ever, but not the last time that fans were able to change the academy’s mind. The very next year, the same thing happened to Paul Muni, who won the award before the academy decided to discontinue the practice. Bette didn’t have to wait long for her first Academy Award, though, because the following year, she won the best actress award for her film Dangerous. Three years later, she would win her second Oscar for the 1938  film Jezebel,where she played a strong-willed southern belle ,in my opinion, better than Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind .Throughout her career, Bette Davis was nominated for 11 Academy Awards,but those were the only two she won. Though, in my opinion, she should have won two more, the first for All about Eve in 1950, which is my favorite of her films ,and the second for What Ever happened to Baby Jane? In which she played a crazy aging child star so hauntingly and tragically that, even though it’s considered camp today, I always cry when I watch.

Off screen Bette Davis co-founded the Hollywood Canteen, which offered food and dancing to service men from 1942 through 1945,during World War two.  Davis was also the first woman president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1941.

When she died in 1989,at the American hospital of Paris from breast cancer, at the age of 81,she’d already survived a mastectomy 6 years earlier as well as 4 strokes.

It’s the strength of Bette Davis that I admire and to which I aspire. And I feel I’m getting there.