Filmography
1931
Bad Sister
Seed
Waterloo Bridge
Way Back Home
1932
The Menace
Hell’s House
The Man Who Played God
So Big!
The Rich Are Always with Us
The Dark Horse
The Cabin in the Cotton
Three on a Match
20,000 Years in Sing Sing
1933
Just Around the Corner (promotional short for G.E.)
Parachute Jumper
The Working Man
Bureau of Missing Persons
Ex-Lady
1934
The Big Shakedown
Fashions of 1934
Jimmy the Gent
Fog Over Frisco
Housewife
1935
Bordertown
The Girl from 10th Avenue
Front Page Woman
Special Agent
1936
The Golden Arrow
Satan Met a Lady
1937
Kid Galahad
That Certain Woman
It’s Love I’m After
1938
The Sisters
1939
Juarez
The Old Maid
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex
1940
1941
Shining Victory (uncredited cameo role)
The Little Foxes
1942
In This Our Life
1943
Thank Your Lucky Stars
1944
Hollywood Canteen
1945
1946
1948
Winter Meeting
June Bride
1949
Beyond the Forest
1950
1951
Payment on Demand
Another Man’s Poison
1952
Phone Call from a Stranger
The Star
1955
The Virgin Queen
1956
The Catered Affair
Storm Center
1959
John Paul Jones
The Scapegoat
1961
1962
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
1963
The Empty Canvas
1964
Where Love Has Gone
1965
The Nanny
1968
The Anniversary
1970
Connecting Rooms
1971
Bunny O’Hare
1972
The Scientific Cardplayer
1976
Burnt Offerings
1978
Return from Witch Mountain
Death on the Nile
1980
The Watcher in the Woods
1987
1989
Wicked Stepmother
Awards
She was nominated for 12 Best Actress Academy Awards and won only two.
| 1934 | Of Human Bondage – write in, not official |
| 1935 | Dangerous – won |
| 1938 | Jezebel – won |
| 1939 | Dark Victory |
| 1940 | The Letter |
| 1941 | The Little Foxes |
| 1942 | Now, Voyager |
| 1944 | Mr. Skeffington |
| 1950 | All About Eve |
| 1952 | The Star |
| 1962 | What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? |
Bette Davis: Learn more about her, review her filmography and more
Ruth Elizabeth Davis was born April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts. Her parents divorced when she was 10. She and her sister were raised by their mother. Her early interest was dance. To Bette, dancers led a glamorous life, but then she discovered the stage, and gave up dancing for acting. To her, it presented much more of a challenge.
After a stint in summer stock theater in Rochester, New York, Davis moved to New York City, where she attended the John Murray Anderson/Robert Milton School of Theatre and Dance.
Davis began to audition for theater parts in New York, and in 1929 she made her stage début at Greenwich Village’s Provincetown Playhouse in The Earth Between . Later that year, at the age of 21, she made her first Broadway appearance in the comedy Broken Dishes .
A screen test landed Davis a contract with Universal Pictures, where she was assigned a small role in the film Bad Sister (1931), followed by similar minor parts in a few more movies. She moved to Warner Brothers in 1932, after gaining notice in that studio’s production of The Man Who Played God . Following this breakthrough, Davis would go on to make 14 films over the next three years.
In 1934, Warner Brothers loaned Davis to RKO Pictures for Of Human Bondage , a drama based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Davis received her first Academy Award nomination for her performance as the cold-hearted waitress Mildred. Throughout the rest of her career, she would portray many other strong-willed, even unlikable, women who defied society’s rules.
Davis won her first Academy Award in 1935, for her role as a troubled young actress in Dangerous . She then appeared in The Petrified Forest with male stars Leslie Howard and Humphrey Bogart in 1936.
Davis received her second Oscar for her performance as a rebellion Southern belle in 1938’s Jezebel . A number of critical and box-office successes followed: She played a heiress coming to terms with mortal illness in Dark Victory and Elizabeth I in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, both released in 1939, and went on to deliver several well-received performances in films of the 1940s, including The Little Foxes ; the comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner ; the drama Now, Voyager ; and the drama The Corn is Green . By the time she severed ties with Warner Brothers in 1949, Davis was one of its largest talents.
In 1950, Davis gave one of her most indelible performances in the show-business drama All About Eve , starring as Margo Channing, a theater actress who fends off the insecurities of approaching middle age and the scheming of a manipulative protégé with sarcastic wit and more than a few cocktails.
Davis played Elizabeth I again in The Virgin Queen (1955) and appeared in Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana on Broadway in 1961. Some of her other work during this time was more lurid, however. In the horror movie and camp classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), she co-starred with Joan Crawford as a former child star caring for her disabled sister. She was featured in another horror film in 1964, Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte , and then played an eye-patch-wearing matriarch in the melodrama The Anniversary in 1968.
Despite health problems in her late years, including a fight against breast cancer, Davis continued acting. She appeared in the horror movie Burnt Offerings (1976) and was part of the all-star cast of the Agatha Christie mystery Death on the Nile (1979). One of her final film roles was that of a blind woman in The Whales of August (1987), appearing opposite Lillian Gish . She also appeared on television, winning an Emmy Award for 1979’s Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter.
Davis received many awards later in life, including the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1977 and the Kennedy Center Honors Award in 1987.
Bette Davis died on October 6, 1989, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, at the age of 81. At the time of her death, she was on her way home from a film festival in Spain, where she had just been honored for her work in film.
Davis published two autobiographies during her lifetime: The Lonely Life (1962) and This ‘n’ That (1987).
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