Bette Davis

Ruth Elizabeth Davis was an American actress with a career spanning more than 50 years and 100 acting credits. A recipient of two Academy Awards, she was the first thespian to accrue ten nominations. In 1999, Davis placed second behind Katharine Hepburn on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest female stars of the classical Hollywood cinema era.

About Bette Davis in brief

Summary Bette DavisRuth Elizabeth Davis was an American actress with a career spanning more than 50 years and 100 acting credits. A recipient of two Academy Awards, she was the first thespian to accrue ten nominations. Davis was known for her forceful and intense style of acting. She was the co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen, a club venue for food, dancing and entertainment for servicemen during World War II. In 1999, Davis placed second behind Katharine Hepburn on the American Film Institute’s list of the greatest female stars of the classical Hollywood cinema era. Her last Oscar nomination was for What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? This was followed up with the film Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte. At the last stage of her career, her most successful films were Death on the Nile and The Whales of August. Her career went through several periods of eclipse, but despite a long period of ill health she continued acting in film and on television until shortly before her death from breast cancer in 1989. Her forthright manner, idiosyncratic speech, and ubiquitous cigarette contributed to a public persona that has been often imitated. She could be combative and confrontational with studio executives and film directors, as well as with her co-stars, expecting the same high standard of performance and commitment from them as she expected from herself. Her daughter, B. D. Hyman, wrote her version of her childhood, My Mother’s Keeper, My Mother’s Keeper.

Her younger sister, Barbara Harriet, was a boarding school boarding school in Berkshires, Massachusetts. In the fall of 1921, Ruth Davis moved to New York City, using her children’s tuition money to enroll in the White School of Photography, with an apartment on 144th Street. She later changed her first name to Bette Fischer, a character in Honoré de Balzac’s La Cousine de La Balzac. She attended the Cushing Academy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and won a competitive dress parade for Mrs Herbert Hoover, whose dress she wore in Madison Square Garden. In 1937, she tried to free herself from her contract with Warner Brothers Studio; although she lost the legal case, it marked the start of more than a decade as one of the most celebrated leading ladies of U.S. cinema. She also starred in financially successful films such as The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, All This, and Heaven Too, The Man Who Came to Dinner and Watch on the Rhine. She was married and divorced four times, raising her children largely as a single parent. She is perhaps best remembered for her role as a Broadway star in All About Eve, which earned her another Oscar nomination and won her the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress. She died in 1989 at the age of 83. She had a daughter, Barbara, who was a member of the New York Film Critics Association. She has a son, David, who is a director and producer.