Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis was an American actress with a career spanning more than 50 years and 100 acting credits. She was noted for playing unsympathetic, sardonic characters, and was famous for her performances in a range of film genres. For Disney, she portrayed Letha Wedge in Return from Witch Mountain and Mrs. Aylwood in The Watcher in the Woods. She also appeared in "Mickey's 50".
Davis was born on April 5, 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts and attended various schools before successfully auditioning for George Cukor's stock theater company in Rochester, New York. After performing in Philadelphia, Washington, and Boston, she made her Broadway debut in 1929 in Broken Dishes and followed it with Solid South.
In 1930, she turned to Hollywood for work and soon found success in the 1934 film Of Human Bondage, playing a vulgar waitress. The following year, Davis appeared in Dangerous where she gained her first Academy Award for Best Actress. She repeated the same success with Jezebel. Davis would receive an additional eight nominations throughout her career with films, like Dark Victory, The Letter, The Little Foxes, Now, Voyager, Mr. Skeffington, All About Eve, The Star, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. Her other notable films include The Petrified Forest, Marked Woman, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, Deception, Beyond the Forest, The Virgin Queen, Pocketful of Miracles, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Death on the Nile, The Whales of August, and Wicked Stepmother.
Also appearing television, Davis made guest appeared in shows, like Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents while also appearing in television films, like White Mama, Little Gloria...Happy at Last, Right of Way, As Summer Dies, A Piano for Mrs. Cimino, The Disappearance of Aimee, and Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter, for which she won an Emmy Award.
Davis was the co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen, a club venue for food, dancing, and entertainment for servicemen during World War II and was the first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Having battled breast cancer throughout the 1980s, Davis would eventually succumb to the disease on October 6, 1989.
Roles[]
(Return from Witch Mountain)
(The Watcher in the Woods)
Trivia[]
- She was among many actresses considered to portray Mary Poppins.
