Dark Victory, The Life of Betty Davis
All About Eve, Now, Voyager, Jezebel, What ever Happened to Baby Jane?.... Bette Davis' films are legendary. Davis herself transcends them.
She
was magnificent and exasperating. Pretty enough to be given the star
treatment in her early twenties, she developed by middle age into a
weathered boniness graced by a slash of red lipstick. Elderly, crippled
by strokes and weakened by breast cancer, she still compelled us to
look, just as she compelled herself to keep acting. Some stared, some
cackled, some didn't care anymore, but Bette Davis never stopped
working. It was the only thing that really mattered in the end.
Dark Victory is
a twenty-first-century rethinking of this titanic actress, whose
centenary will be in 2008. Treating her films at least as acutely as she
herself did - and often more admiringly - Dark Victory traces
Davis's rise to stardom at Warner Bros., her powerful drive to wrangle
and oppose, her bitter disappointments and sporadic moments of public
triumph, her four failed marriages, and her strategies for continuing
her career in the face of age and popular tastes. It covers Davis's
films on an equal footing with her personal life because she believed in
her work and her work was terrific. Dark Victory takes that
belief as the starting point. She wasn't just a star but a gifted artist
who changed the face of acting. This book respects her talent.
Headstrong
and scrappy, Davis hacked her way through Hollywood's front offices and
didn't much care who or what she chopped, all in pursuit of the
essential truth of filmed fiction, an electric authenticity in which she
never stopped believing. Davis could be radiant, but she didn't
hesitate to make herself appear repulsive onscreen when she thought the
role demanded it. She fought for the right to perform women as cruelly
as she pleased, if that's what she thought her characters deserved.
Bette Davis wasn't afraid to cause a scene, onscreen or off.
