Bette Davis

Bette Davis

Bette Davis

Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis was an American actress. She was born on April 5, 1908 at Lowell, Massachusetts, United States. Her parents were Ruth 

Augusta and Harlow Morrell Davis. She studied in Cushing Academy, a boarding school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. Her future husband, Harmon O. Nelson, also studied there. She saw a production of Henrik Ibsen's, "The Wild Duck" with Blanche Yurka and "Peg Entwistle" in 1926 from where she got inspired for her career as an actress. She said, "Before that performance I wanted to be an actress. When it ended, I had to be an actress, exactly like Peg Entwistle."

Davis moved to Hollywood in 1930, but her early films for Universal Studios were unsuccessful. In 1932, she married Harmon Nelson and the same year she linked up with Warner Bros. and started her golden career with fabulous performances. In 1938, Nelson obtained evidence that Davis was engaged in a sexual relationship with Howard Hughes and subsequently filed for divorce citing Davis's "cruel and inhuman manner."

Till late 1940s, she was one of the American cinema's most celebrated leading ladies, known for her forceful and intense style. Davis married with Farnsworth at Home Ranch, in Lake Montezuma, Arizona, in December 1940 who died in 1943.  Davis sold war bonds after the attack on Pearl Harbor. She sold two million dollars worth of bonds in two days, as well as a picture of herself in Jezebel for $250,000. She also performed for black regiments as the only white member of an acting troupe formed by Hattie McDaniel, which included Lena Horne and Ethel Waters. In 1945, she married artist William Grant Sherry but after five years on July 3, 1950 she got divorce from William Sherry. On July 28, 1950 she married Gary Merrill her marriage continued to deteriorate until she filed for divorce in 1960.

In 1983, Davis was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. Within two weeks of her surgery she suffered four strokes which caused paralysis in the left side of her face and in her left arm, and left her with slurred speech. With the help of physical therapy and aided by her personal assistant, Kathryn Sermak, gained partial recovery from the paralysis. Her relationship with her daughter, B. D. Hyman, devolved when Hyman became a born-again Christian and warned Davis to for suit. Hyman had published a memoir, My Mother's Keeper, in which she chronicled a difficult mother-daughter relationship and depicted scenes of Davis's overbearing and drunken behavior. Davis wrote, "I am still recovering from the fact that a child of mine would write about me behind my back, to say nothing about the kind of book it is. I will never recover as completely from B.D.'s book as I have from the stroke. Both were shattering experiences." 

She collapsed during the American Cinema Awards in 1989 and later discovered that her cancer had returned.She recovered sufficiently and  travel to Spain to get the honor at the Donostia-San Sebastián International Film Festival, but during her visit her health rapidly deteriorated. Too weak to make the long journey back to the U.S., she traveled to France where she died on October 6, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Davis was 81 years old.

Some of her movies were:-

The Bad Sister (1931),  Seed (1931), The Man Who Played God (1932),  Dangerous (1935), The Petrified Forest (1936),  Marked Woman (1937),  Jezebel (1938),  Dark Victory (1939), The Old Maid,  The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939),  All This and Heaven Too (1940), The Letter (1940),  The Great Lie (1941),  The Little Foxes (1941),  Watch on the Rhine (1943),  Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943),  Old Acquaintance (1943),  Mr. Skeffington (1944), The Corn Is Green (1945), A Stolen Life (1946),  Deception (1946),  The African Queen (1951),  June Bride (1948),  Beyond the Forest (1949), The Story of a Divorce (1951),  All About Eve (1950), Two's Company in 1952, The Virgin Queen (1955), Storm Center (1956), and The Catered Affair (1956),  The Night of the Iguana in 1961, A Pocketful of Miracles (1961),  What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962),  Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) and more