Ruth Elisabeth Davis nasce il 5 aprile 1908 a Lowell, una cittadina del Massachusetts, figlia di un inglese che abbandonò la famiglia quando la Davis aveva 7 anni, e di una francese. Finita in collegio insieme alla sorella, a undici anni Bette Davis scoprì la sua voglia di recitare: quando a diciotto anni lasciò il collegio, il primo lavoro che trovò fu come modella, posando nuda per la scultrice Anne Coleman Ladd che stava realizzando una fontana. Dopo aver lavorato come cameriera e frequentato per un anno corsi serali di recitazione a New York, si iscrive all'Anderson School of Theatre, dove sua compagna di corso è la ricca Katharine Hepburn. Alla fine del 1928 esordisce a Broadway con una particina, ma nello stesso anno ha il suo primo ruolo di protagonista con In mezzo alla terra; in seguito nel 1930 vince un premio come migliore attrice giovane dell'anno, tanto che nel 1931 approda a Hollywood.
Quando si presenta per un'audizione, il produttore Samuel Goldwin la caccia urlando: "Dove l'avete scovata questa orribile creatura?". La Davis infatti non è certo bella, ha le guance paffute, gli occhi grandi e sporgenti, ma ha talento e un incrollabile determinazione a sfondare, tanto che il produttore David Werner le dirà: "Hai il fascino di Stanlio e Ollio messi assieme, ma ti prendo per il tuo talento".
Nei suoi primi film, Bette - ormai così viene chiamata - diventa "vera e propria essenza della sottomissione" come scrive Variety, ma la fama del suo brutto carattere diventa celeberrima.
Nel 1933 gira Ventimila anni a Sing-Sing, con Spencer Tracy, poi Schiavo d'amore, e nel 1935 Paura d'amare, che le frutterà il primo Oscar: secondo i critici fu il premio giusto per un film sbagliato, l'atto riparatore per non averglielo concesso l'anno precedente per Schiavo d'amore. Nel 1936 gira La foresta pietrificata, nel 1937 Avventura a mezzanotte ma subito dopo non riesce a ottenere con suo grande disappunto il ruolo di Rossella in Via col vento. Il riscatto arrivò prontamente con l'Oscar per Jezebel, la figlia del vento e nel 1940, con Ombre malesi è "capace di alternare calcolo e isteria con passaggi da brivido". Dopo Piccole volpi nel 1950 ottiene un successo strepitoso con Eva contro Eva, con il quale si aggiudica un premio speciale della giuria e Palma come miglior attrice al festival di Cannes (in questo film tiene a battesimo il futuro mito Marilyn Monroe).
La Davis ottiene ancora altri successi come Angeli con la pistola, Che fine ha fatto Baby Jane, un thrilling con la sua nemica di sempre Joan Crawford, ma in seguito per evitare il declino arriverà addirittura a mettere inserzioni firmate a pagamento sui giornali per cercare lavoro. Nel 1965 gira Piano piano dolce Carlotta, in cui i produttori volevano riformare la coppia vincente Davis-Crawford, ma Bette costringe la Crawford ad andarsene ottenendo come partner Olivia De Havilland, una delle sue poche amiche. Da allora la Davis si dedica alla televisione, interpretando uno sceneggiato, Hotel, molto seguito in America.
Nel 1972 è in Italia per girare Lo scopone scientifico, sviluppando una robusta antipatia per Alberto Sordi, da lei ritenuto maleducato e provinciale, che durerà per il resto dei suoi giorni.
Colpita da osteomielite, i giornali la danno per morente, ma dopo essere guarita, nel 1983 le sopravviene un tumore al seno e pochi mesi dopo è colpita da ictus e poi da infarto. La Davis riuscirà ancora a riprendersi, tanto che nel 1986 interpreta Balene d'agosto.
Bette Davis muore il 7 ottobre del 1989 in un ospedale di Parigi, uccisa da un male incurabile: pochi giorni prima aveva ritirato il premio che la giuria del festival di San Sebastiano le aveva conferito per la sua lunga carriera. Viene sepolta alla "Court of Remembrance" nel cimitero di Forest Lawn (Hollywood Hills) a Los Angeles.

CURIOSITA'
-Il suo nome completo era Ruth Elizabeth Davis.

-Scartata in un primo momento dalla Universal che la riteneva attrice priva di sex-appeal, si legò ad un lussuoso contratto rinnovabile con la Warner Bros, dal quale la diva nel 1936 cercò di liberarsi facendo causa a Londra per danni morali. Il tribunale le diede torto e la Davis rientrò nei ranghi fino al termine dell'accordo, nel 1949.

-E' stata interprete di primo piano anche in due film italiani, La noia e Lo scopone scientifico.

-Fu moglie quattro volte (Harmon Nelson, Arthur Farnsworth, William G. Sherry, Gary Miller) ed ebbe tre figli: già nel 1933 era rimasta incinta decidendo di abortire per non compromettere la sua carriera.

-Fece parte del nutrito stuolo di pretendenti al ruolo di Rossella O'Hara in Via col vento, assegnato poi a Vivien Leigh.

-Dagli anni Settanta è stata molto attiva in televisione, interprete di numerosi serial e sceneggiati.

-La sua ultima interpretazione in Balene d'agosto del 1987 la vide al fianco di un'altra attrice famosissima e come lei ormai sul viale del tramonto, Lilian Gish.

-Gli ultimi anni della sua vita sono stati amareggiati da un libro scritto dall'unica figlia naturale, Barbara, che l'accusava di ogni sorta di nefandezze. Reagì da par suo, pubblicando una biografia intitolata Questo e quello, tradotta in molte lingue.

-Alla Davis, e in particolare ai suoi occhi, negli anni Ottanta è stata anche dedicata la canzone Bette Davis eyes di Kim Carnes.

BETTE DAVIS, born 100 years ago this week, made her first appearance on film in 1931 and her last in 1989, and like every star of her generation she was always ready for her close-up. The difference with Davis — part of what makes her, I think, the greatest actress of the American cinema — was, she didn’t need it. You could tell what she was thinking and feeling from across the room, even a very large one like the ballroom she swoops into, wearing a red dress, in William Wyler’s “Jezebel” (1938), scandalizing the haut monde of 1852 New Orleans; unmarried young women like her character, Julie Marsden, are expected to wear white. But Julie wants to make an impression, and she does; and as she takes a turn on the dance floor with her stiff-backed escort, you can see, although most of the sequence is long shots, her growing awareness that she has made a terrible mistake, that she has gone, for once, too far.
Her dancing is limp, reluctant; her shoulders sag; and her head is bowed a little, as if she were trying to hide from the disapproving gaze of the assembled revelers: a shocking sensation for Julie, who, like most every character Davis ever played, is accustomed to looking people straight in the eye. There are close-ups in the scene, but it’s in the long shots that you sense most powerfully the burden of that unfortunate dress on this suddenly humiliated woman, feel the depth of her regret and the strength of her desire to be wearing something, anything, else. Bette Davis could make you see red in black and white.
Davis certainly knew how to make an impression, though her boldness, like Julie Marsden’s, sometimes had unintended consequences. Moviegoers familiar with her only from late horror films like “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962) and “Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964) — the most substantial hits of the last four decades of her career — may think of her as a campy grotesque, a cartoon diva. That’s perhaps partly her own fault, for attacking those ludicrous roles with such unseemly comic gusto. And her performer’s soul must have been gratified by the attention they brought: better to be noticed, for whatever reason, than ignored. (“Baby Jane” even earned her an Oscar nomination, her last of 10.)

But on the occasion of her centennial, it’s worth remembering Davis as she was in her prime, in the 1930s and ’40s, when she commanded the screen with something subtler and more mysterious than the fierce, simple will that carried her through the mostly grim jobs of work that followed. (Though the will was there from the start, and her formidable technique never wholly deserted her.) In her heyday, as the reigning female star at Warner Brothers, she was as electrifying as Marlon Brando in the ’50s: volatile, sexy, challenging, fearlessly inventive. She looked moviegoers straight in the eye and dared them to look away.
Usually they kept looking, even when she was putting on display, as she frequently did, the unlovelier aspects of human nature. Her breakthrough role, after three years of more or less routine assignments, came in John Cromwell’s 1934 adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham novel “Of Human Bondage,” in which she plays the coldhearted Cockney temptress Mildred Rogers, a vile specimen who cruelly — and protractedly — abuses the affections of a sensitive, artistic, clubfooted young medical student.
It was a part Davis had campaigned for. At that point in her career she had nothing to lose by taking on a juicy role that the better-established actresses in town wouldn’t touch for fear of damaging their images. But even after she was a star herself, and had plenty to lose, Davis persisted in playing women who were frankly, unapologetically bad: characters like Stanley Timberlake in John Huston’s odd, disturbing Southern melodrama “In This Our Life” (1942); Rosa Moline in King Vidor’s overheated “Beyond the Forest” (1949); and especially Leslie Crosbie and Regina Giddens, the heroines of two further collaborations with William Wyler, “The Letter” (1940) and “The Little Foxes” (1941).
There’s no mystery, really, about why she would choose to portray so many selfish, conniving, amoral, downright malevolent human beings: any actor who doesn’t know that, say, Lady Macbeth and Iago are pretty good parts should probably consider a different line of work. It’s also perfectly clear why other stars of her stature were less keen to dirty their hands with such unattractive characters: in the studio era actors were brand-name products, and audiences tended to identify them with the parts they played. Late in life Davis ruefully told an interviewer, “The more successful an actor, the less he or she gets to act.” She added, “People come to expect a personality, and that’s the kind of parts you get offered, ones to suit audience expectations of your star’s persona.”
Bette Davis, God knows, could supply some personality. Versatile though she was, she was never an empty-vessel sort of actor like Daniel Day-Lewis. Part of the strange thrill of watching her perform is the tension you feel between the demands of the role and the demands of her outsize self, constantly threatening to breach the boundaries of the character.
In her bad movies, and there are many, you can always sense her impatience with the material she’s been given. She’ll start working her huge eyes a little more, bulging them out for emphasis or hooding them like a snake about to strike. Or she’ll pace restlessly, her clicking heels punctuating every clipped, spit-out line. Or she’ll do something tricky with her (ever-present) cigarette, holding it in an unusual way or stubbing it out abruptly or amusing herself by varying the rhythm of her exhalations. She’s like a kid with too much energy; when she’s bored, she fidgets and colors outside the lines.
As a moviegoer you can’t help being grateful for that nervous ingenuity. Her endless bits of business may not always be, strictly speaking, necessary for her characters, but the truth is that most of the dozens of movies she appeared in her long career — 45 in the first 10 years alone — were, strictly speaking, junk. The women she portrayed wouldn’t be any more believable if she’d played them straight; just duller.
And when she got a part worthy of her gifts, she had the wit to put the lab work done in her lesser pictures to good use. In Lloyd Bacon’s terrific “Marked Woman” (1937), for instance, in which she plays a nightclub hostess (read prostitute), you see a kind of distillation of all the tramps, gun molls and shady dames she’d played as an eager young nonstar under contract to studios that didn’t know what to do with her. Her character in “Marked Woman,” is a wonderfully complex creation, a wary survivor who’s both proud of her sex appeal and slightly uncomfortable with it: not a hooker with a heart of gold, exactly, but a hooker who prefers to keep her heart as much to herself as possible.
And in one of her most celebrated roles, as the panicky aging actress Margo Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s “All About Eve” (1950), Davis trots out every bad habit she’d developed over the years, every “Bette Davis” mannerism, and makes them all seem, strictly speaking, necessary: real aspects of an unmistakably real woman. It helps, obviously, that Margo happens to be an actress. (This was a specialty of Davis’s. She played actresses in no fewer than five of her pictures, including “Dangerous,” for which she won her first Academy Award in 1935. The other was for “Jezebel.”) She can get away with gestures and intonations that might be considered somewhat over the top in, say, a real-estate lawyer; theatricality is part of who she is, maybe the largest part.
But — and this is the beauty of the performance — it isn’t all she is. It would have been easy for Davis to play Margo as a pathetic drama queen. What she does is much more interesting: the performance is dry-eyed and free of camp posturing, the portrait of a woman whose theatricality is natural, both as an expression of her self and as a tool of her peculiar trade. It’s something she’s learned to live with, and to make a living from. Bouts of insecurity and emotional neediness are occupational hazards, as is a certain inability to resist the dramatic moment — standing on a staircase at a party, for example, to announce, “Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night” — but on balance Margo, mannerisms and all, seems a surprisingly level-headed woman. In the end she’s a trouper.
So was Davis, who never retired from acting and lasted, improbably, to 81, after a lifetime of abusing alcohol, nicotine and, often, her directors. Her best director was Wyler, who abused her back, productively. The three movies they made together represent one of the great collaborations of a filmmaker and an actor in the history of movies, because Wyler’s theatrical intelligence was a match for hers. (She once referred to him, admiringly, as “the male Bette Davis.”)
They fell out during “The Little Foxes,” perhaps because both realized, on some level, that they couldn’t hope to surpass the intimate anatomy of evil they had together managed to get on the screen in “The Letter.” That picture’s heroine, a Singapore planter’s wife, is, like so many of Davis’s most vivid characters, a creature of urgent need, but she’s cooler, more controlled than most. She kills her lover and lies to her husband (and the court) with remarkable equanimity. And because Wyler persuaded Davis — “persuaded” may be too mild a word — to mute her mannerisms, her every glance and movement seems to register with particular force, passion straining to burst free of its confinement.
Watching the first scene of “The Letter” is as good a way as any to remember Davis on her birthday. She strides out, with that fast, purposeful walk of hers, onto the veranda, pumps some lead into her prone paramour, then pauses, lowering her gun hand slowly, to contemplate what she’s done, striking a pose (in medium long shot) that looks both melancholy and defiant. That’s Bette Davis as she was at her best: first in furious motion, then eerily, eloquently still. She was no drama queen. She was drama in the flesh.
Da The New York Times, 29 Marzo 2008

Venerdì sera è morta, nell’ospedale americano di Parigi, Bette Davis. Aveva 81 anni. Era arrivata a Parigi da San Sebastiano, in Spagna, dove il mese scorso, come ospite d’onore del Festival Internazionale del Cinema, aveva ricevuto il premio "Donostia" alla carriera. Elizabeth Ruth Davis, nata nel 1908 a Lowell, un sobborgo di Boston, arrivò a 23 anni a Hollywood. Nella sua lunga e sfolgorante carriera ha interpretato oltre 80 film. Candidata dieci volte all’Oscar ne ha vinti due: nel 1935 per "Paura d’amare" e nel 1938 per "Jezebel" ("La figlia del vento"). Tra le sue migliori interpretazioni "Piccole volpi" (1941), "Eva contro Eva" (1950), "Che fine ha fatto Baby Jane?" (1962), "Piano piano dolce Carlotta" (1964), "Lo scopone scientifico" (1972). Nel 1977 la Davis fu la prima donna a ricevere il "Life Achievement Award", il premio alla carriera dell’American Film Institute. Nel 1979 vinse un premio Emmy, l’oscar televisivo, per "Strangers... The story of a mother and a daughter". Famosa per i suoi ruoli di donna dura e insensibile lo fu anche nella vita. Dai suoi quattro matrimoni ebbe un’unica figlia che nel 1983 in "My mother’s keeper" mise a nudo l’infelicità dei loro rapporti. Come la vecchia Hollywood, di cui diventò la leggenda, anche Bette era bravissima, ricca, aggressiva. E, a volte, spietata.. Se si chiedeva a Bette Davis perché avesse tanto spesso impersonato donne nevrotiche e diaboliche, rispondeva: "Perché sono una delle donne meno nevrotiche di Hollywood". Le attrici nevrotiche e diaboliche - aggiungeva - rifiutano quei ruoli per paura di mostrarsi nella loro vera natura, eppure si tratta dei ruoli più divertenti da interpretare. E poi, "io non mi sono mai preoccupata dell’opinione della gente". è così che ci si immagina la protagonista di Figlia del vento (William Wyler, 1938) o di Ombre malesi (Wyler, 1940): dura e decisa quanto basta per reggere personaggi insieme sgradevoli e forti. Eppure, proprio poco prima di girare Figlia del vento, le era stata offerta l’occasione di mutare totalmente la propria immagine: sarebbe potuta essere Rossella Ò Hara in Via col vento. Sarebbe potuta essere, appunto: avrebbe solo dovuto accettare come partner Errol Flynn nel ruolo di Rhett Butler. Era questa la condizione posta da Jack Warner, alla cui major erano legati entrambi, Bette ed Errol. Solo che lei lo considerava un attorucolo scadente, e d’altra parte Selznick non ne voleva sapere dell’interprete di Capitan Blood (Michael Curtiz, 1935). Il risultato fu che Scarlett ebbe il volto di Vivien Leigh, che la Leigh ebbe l’Oscar del ‘39, e che l’attrice meno nevrotica e diabolica di Hollywood - ma anche la più dura e "cattiva" - divenne irreversibilmente il simbolo cinematografico della donna nevrotica e diabolica. A questo, del resto, in qualche modo era obbligata, fin dall’inizio della sua carriera, alla fine degli anni 20 e nella prima metà degli anni 30. Lontana dai canoni di bellezza hollywoodiani, il successo poteva venirle appunto solo insistendo sul lato drammatico del suo volto. Ci fu anzi chi le suggerì di rinunciare al suo nome, "da stenografa", e di cambiarlo in Bettina Dawes, che sembrava più indicato al personaggio che si sarebbe dovuta costruire addosso. Del resto, la Warner - che l’aveva sotto contratto dal ‘32 - puntava soprattutto su immagini maschili, su divi come James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson e, più tardi, Humphrey Bogart (e invece la Mgm e la Paramount erano specializzate in dive). A lei dunque toccavano parti di secondo piano, sempre all’ombra di un personaggio maschile, anche se ormai la notorietà era stata raggiunta, al punto d’essere addirittura coronata da un Oscar (Paura d’amare, Alfred E. Green, 1935: a proposito di Oscar, la Davis ha sempre rivendicato il merito d’aver scovato lei il nome della statuetta più famosa del cinema, che - diceva - di schiena somigliava tutta a suo marito Oscar). Dopo il film di Green - da lei stessa definito sdolcinato - le si presenta la prima vera grande occasione con La foresta pietrificata (Archie Mayo, 1936, con un grandissimo Bogart): la sua interpretazione di Gaby Maple fu essenziale, spontanea, commovente. Ma fu proprio con Figlia del vento - che sembra quasi scelto per differenziare la propria immagine da quella della Vivien Leigh di Via col vento - che la Bette Davis diabolica e nevrotica venne "fissata". Seguirono fino alla metà degli anni 40 altri grandi film: Ombre malesi, Piccole volpi (Wyler, 1941), In questa nostra vita (John Huston, 1942). E poi, con gli anni 50 e 60, la "diva" Bette Davis entra quasi nell’ombra. E tuttavia viene forse in maggior evidenza l’"attrice", la grande attrice. O c’è forse bisogno di ricordare Eva contro Eva (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), Angeli con la pistola (Frank Capra, 1961), Che fine ha fatto Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1961), Piano... piano, dolce Carlotta (Aldrich, 1965)?.

Da Il Sole 24 Ore, 8 Ottobre 1989

The last time I saw Bette Davis, she was in her dotage, the painful ravages of cancer and a paralyzing stroke cruelly evident. We had tea in a Manhattan hotel room, and she admitted her two favorite words were “What’s next?” Her days in front of a camera were mortgaged beyond revival, but with her flaring nostrils and incendiary nicotine butts, and still walking like an anchovy, she slashed the air with one parting shot: “You have not seen the end of Bette Davis!”
Apparently she was right. Eighteen years after her death, they are still writing books about her. This is as it should be. She created a template for movie acting that generations of starlets have tried but failed to follow. So the obsession with Bette Davis continues to resonate, redefining Hollywood “longevity.” Few of yesterday’s divinities affect audiences with the same force. But after so many friends, enemies, colleagues and poseurs — even her daughter B. D., who logged in with her own controversial “Mommie Dearest”-type broadside — have written everything they know, the question is “What else is there to say?” With Ed Sikov’s “Dark Victory” as evidence, I submit that the answer is a reluctant “Nothing much.”
Sikov, who has written biographies of Billy Wilder and Peter Sellers, displays scant information about her life and career that we haven’t come across before. From yellow newspaper clippings, corporate memos, Warner Brothers archives, passages extracted from other books (most notably her autobiography, “The Lonely Life”), interviews with peripheral associates and old Louella Parsons columns, Sikov recycles the suspensions, marriages, affairs and abortions, and her feuds with Miriam Hopkins, Errol Flynn (she once told me his idea of art was the fruit in a slot machine) and, of course, her archnemesis, Joan Crawford. Sikov’s juiciest implication is that Bette’s legendary hatred of Joan was based on the fact that Davis, because of her uptight Yankee sensibility, refused to have any part of a lesbian affair with her broad-shouldered, bisexual rival.

This is often readable stuff, but cluttered with so many annoying endnotes the text sometimes looks like an accounting ledger. You can’t say the author didn’t spend long stretches in the library. Among the odd revelations: Davis longed for a husband who was a homosexual and proposed to several such men (Lord knows how that would have set back the gay liberation movement). Despite her claims, she did not name the Academy Award “Oscar” after one husband’s naked backside. The year she won her first Oscar, for “Dangerous” (she hated the movie and considered the award a consolation prize, since she hadn’t even been nominated the previous year for “Of Human Bondage”), Davis earned only $18,200. The last time she saw her most famous husband, Gary Merrill, on a flight to Maine, she had moved into the final and loneliest phase of her life, and he had moved on to Rita Hayworth. Still, she went over to say hello, and he refused even to look up from the book he was reading. You also discover the shocking, meanspirited contents of the will she left behind. By the time her final curtain fell, she had alienated almost everyone except the woman her friends continually describe as the Eve Harrington in her life — a secretary and surrogate daughter named Kathryn Sermak, to whom she bequeathed half of her estate.
Some of this is interesting, but for passionate Davis fans panting for fresh insights and staggering revelations, disappointment is guaranteed. The Bette Davis I knew — scrambling eggs for me in her Connecticut farmhouse in her bare feet, then writing scathing letters condemning me to journalism hell for imaginary slights like quoting comments that reflected her hatred of Richard Nixon and leaving my phone off the hook at 3 a.m. — forged from ambition and pure grit an acting style that combined distilled emotional truth and complete artificiality. Her life was bold and punchy, full of contradictions. Distant yet intimate, bitchy yet humane, controlled yet flamboyant, a firebrand longing for domesticity, she bristled with the kind of neurotic tension that is often mistaken for creative energy. Acknowledging the conflicts in the life of the star labeled “the fourth Warner Brother,” Sikov has done his research but is rarely original. He pans for gold but finds no new vein to mine. The result is a combination of critical assessments and decades-old anecdotes that pass the time pleasantly. But the book fails to analyze why she became such a confounding mix of gregarious free spirit, miserable cuss and anal-retentive one-woman army, staging battles against the cigar-chewing studio Goliaths. Basically, it’s the work of a reference librarian. The writing lacks fluidity and finesse and smacks of awe, just barely scratching the surface of her tortured life and the mess she made of it.
Still, I admire the way Sikov resists her posthumous Lorelei call, seeing through her sarcasm, jealousy, fear and self-delusion. And he doesn’t whitewash her faults. Even in her day, some actresses bonded with their colleagues. There is no proof that Bette was ever one of them (although she did sleep with several co-stars and at least two of her directors, probably more). She was an alligator pear in more ways than one, and although she was called many things, “cozy” was not one of them. Davis serving cupcakes to her girlfriends over canasta is as hard to imagine as four-star restaurants in the New York subway. To his credit, the author does portray, however weakly, a restless dissatisfaction in Bette Davis that seems positively inspired. Amazingly, between martinis, she turned out some art.
Chronicling her 18 years and 52 pictures at Warner Brothers, Sikov gets totally moonstruck at the thought of soap operas like “Dark Victory” and “Jezebel.” He shares the practically Stanislavskian details of how, for “Now, Voyager,” she insisted on the idea of lighting two cigarettes at once for that historic ending and orchestrated the makeover from the dowdy old maid Charlotte Vale and her caterpillar eyebrows to the alluring Camille Beauchamps, descending from the ship stairs 50 pounds lighter in a Greta Garbo hat. I especially like the passages in which he compares the hysterics and despair in her characters with the self-destructive deficiencies that characterized Davis at her worst. For the second act of her film career, he rightfully devotes 10 pages to the seminal role of Margo Channing in “All About Eve,” but ignores the power of Davis’s versatility in the underrated “Catered Affair” — the ability to hold her own with a great writer (Gore Vidal) and a no-nonsense director (Richard Brooks), brilliantly playing against type as an overweight Bronx mother. Sikov is ambivalent about her attempts to resuscitate her diminished career on the stage, and he wastes too much space on campy programmers like “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” Does anyone want to rehash how she lost the role of Scarlett O’Hara, or how she took out a controversial want ad, begging for employment, in the Hollywood trades? Her third act was the kind of tragic scenario she would have turned down at Warners.
She accomplished a lot, but the one thing she never perfected was the art of knowing when to waft away gracefully, like a smoke ring from one of her ossified cigarettes. In her declining years, she suffered the agues of aging without a trace of warmth. Resting at last on “The Whales of August,” her final completed film (1987), Sikov barely begins to describe the full extent of her arrogance toward the director, Lindsay Anderson, or the insulting hostility she inflicted on her 92-year-old co-star, Lillian Gish. She was still slugging it out, but with all the wrong people. According to those I know who worked on that film, the monster had come full circle. In the end, she was sick, eccentric, cranky, demanding and enough of a pill to drive her colleagues to thoughts of homicide. “I think,” Anderson wrote to a friend, “she is essentially mad.” Sikov’s accurate descriptions of her daunting final days evoke the central piece of the Bette Davis puzzle: the self-imposed loneliness that comes with hard-earned iconoclasm. Instead of becoming pensive and generous, she grew strident, paranoid and desperate. She had stayed too long at the fair and couldn’t find the exit, so she spent a lot of time in a rage, guzzling alcohol, writing nasty letters and slamming the door on old friends. She was still awesome, but also frightening — and pathetic.
Sikov sums her up as “a warrior to the end.” But I’ll stick with Ann Sothern, who, at the time of Davis’s death, said, “Bette, rest in peace — and honey, wherever you are, lighten up.”
Now, voyager.
And wear a hat.
Da The New York Times, 4 Novembre 2007