by Sue Corbett
The resolution and capriciousness Bette Davis displayed on screen was very much part of her private character and during her career she had inevitable battles with studios who tried to curb her independence of spirit. It was a spirit that enabled her to survive an unhappy childhood and three broken marriages, and long before feminism became a rallying cry she was the epitome of the liberated woman.
She was born on April 5, 1908, in Lowell, Massachusetts, and christened Ruth Elizabeth — the name Bette (so spelt in tribute to Balzac’s La Cousine Bette) was adopted in her teens, when her mother became a professional photographer and began to consider some kind of show business career for her.
She early began studying, acting and dancing, and made her professional debut while still at school in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In 1928 she entered John Murray Anderson’s school in New York, where she studied acting under Anderson and dancing under Martha Graham. A year in repertory led to her first Broadway appearance in a play called The Earth Between (1929). Two more Broadway plays later, after her second screen test, she was put under contract to Universal and went out to Hollywood for the first time. From then until the mid 1970s she was rarely away from the studios, and with few intervals she made in regular succession some 90 films, frequently at the rate of three or four a year.
She began, in the traditional fashion, with small roles — in her first film, Bad Sister, she played, improbably, the good sister and was apparently regarded as something of a problem: not glamorous enough to be a siren, not conventional enough to play classy, ladylike roles, with a strange nervous intensity which made her difficult to cast.
There her career might have stayed had she not been cast by George Arliss as the female lead in his talkie version of The Man Who Played God (1932) at Warner Brothers — her Universal contract having meanwhile expired. In this she was widely noticed, the association with Arliss gave her a new standing in Hollywood, and, perhaps most important, as a result of the film she was put under contract to Warner Bros, the company which controlled her career, and one of whose chief box-office attractions she was, for some 17 years.
Her first great role came in 1934 with her extraordinary creation as Somerset Maugham’s unscrupulous Cockney waitress in Of Human Bondage, a performance which, despite some obtrusive mannerisms and uncertainties, still holds up remarkably well. It was widely felt that Bette Davis should have won her first Academy Award for this film, and that the award she got the following year for Dangerous, in which she gave a virtuoso performance as an alcoholic ex-actress (at the ripe old age of 27), was something in the nature of a consolation prize.
Immediately after Dangerous she made another of her most famous films, The Petrified Forest, a rather stagy adaptation of Robert E. Sherwood’s play in which she starred opposite Leslie Howard, a teaming repeated bizarrely in It’s Love I’m After (1937), where they were uncharacteristically called upon to play broad comedy.
The teaming was famously not repeated in Gone With The Wind, Scarlett O’Hara being a role Bette Davis passionately wanted to play. But, again, she received compensation with a very similar role in the Goldwyn production Jezebel, directed by William Wyler, and, again, she was given an Oscar for it. This inaugurated the 1940s, perhaps the greatest period in her career, with classic following classic. Not that all of them were classics on the same level: some of them were classics, in particular retrospectively, of camp rather than true quality. But among them were films in which Bette Davis was a remarkable part of a remarkable whole, such as William Wyler’s The Letter and The Little Foxes, William Dieterle’s historical drama Juarez, and John Huston’s In This Our Life. And the shameless vehicles for a display of big-star fireworks, like Dark Victory, The Old Maid, Now, Voyager, Old Acquaintance, Mr Skeffington and Deception are somehow given a conviction which transcends the nonsense elements in them by the sheer intensity of Bette Davis’s involvement in her roles.
The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) was her first film in colour and saw her famous portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I, her favourite role and one she repeated 16 years later in The Virgin Queen.
In 1949 her long-lasting contract with Warner Bros, the subject of some famous litigation in the 1930s when Bette Davis spearheaded a revolt of Hollywood stars against the restrictions of the contract system, ended with one of her most peculiar films, King Vidor’s Beyond The Forest, in which she was called upon to disport herself in a Charles Addams wig as a femme fatale of the Mid-West: “Men turned and stared when Rosa Moline passed by” — as well they might. For this film the publicity department coined the immortal slogan “Nobody’s as good as Bette when she’s bad”, a line which nicely if simplistically summed up much of her work during these years.
Strangely enough, this seeming low in her career led, quite by chance (she was the third choice for the role), to what remains perhaps the definitive Bette Davis portrayal, Margo Channing in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950) — the temperamental actress, betrayed by her young protégée but finding true love in the process. This used — as nearly as any character she played — the full range of her talents and an extra something of total instinctive identification between actress and role.
The years that followed brought ups and downs, the most important up being the title role in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, in which Robert Aldrich brought together two arch rivals of Hollywood, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, as rival sisters, both Hollywood has-beens, with vicious designs on each other’s health and sanity. This inaugurated a period of horror and semi-horror films, such as Dead Ringer, Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and The Nanny, with Bette Davis, as usual, gallantly trying her hand at anything that offered, absorbed in her craft and the necessity of continuing to exercise it, even in decidedly less than propitious conditions. During this time she also made occasional returns to the stage, notably in a revue, Two’s Company (1952) with her then husband, Gary Merrill, and in Tennessee Williams’s Night of the Iguana (1961). She also wrote her autobiography, The Lonely Life (1962), one of the franker and more personal of as-told-to Hollywood books.
Though she had lost her looks, and some of her stamina, and had a serious operation for cancer, Bette Davis continued to be busy well into her seventies. Much of her work was now for television, where she enhanced many a routine drama. But there were cinema films as well and when playing an imperious American matron in Agatha Christie’s Death On The Nile (1978) she showed she could still hold her own in an all-star cast. Four years before a stage comeback in Miss Moffat, a musical version of one of her cinema successes, The Corn Is Green, proved abortive when she withdrew through illness. Her last important film role was opposite another veteran actress, Lillian Gish, in Lindsay Anderson’s The Whales of August which appeared in 1987.
Bette Davis was on her way home to California via Paris when she died, after having attended this year’s San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain where she had been specially honoured.
Star quality — the ability to project personality, to just exist interestingly on screen — is one thing, and acting talent — the ability to create a variety of different characters, to bury the actor in the role — quite another. Bette Davis was the supreme example of their co-existence in one and the same performer — the most starry of film actors, the most actorly of film stars. Her unmistakable vocal mannerisms, even her distinctive ways of smoking a cigarette, made her the delight of imitators — yet, though herself a symbol of Hollywood and the star system, she managed to transcend them both often enough to make the whole thing worthwhile. There never was, and never will be, anyone like her.
Her acting ability appealed to the widest audiences and in the most diverse circumstances. One such testimony of her success was from wartime Britain. “Jock” Colville, Churchill’s secretary, in a diary entry of January 1945, wrote: “After dinner there was a film in an Air Ministry room on the ground floor in King Charles St. The PM bid us all cast care aside… and so all the typists, drivers, servan
ts, etc, saw. .. Bette Davis in Dark Victory, a brilliantly acted film and one of the few I have seen end as a tragedy”.
Of her four marriages, the second ended with the death of her husband and the other three in divorce. Her fourth husband was the actor, Gary Merrill, with whom she appeared in films and on stage. “I have not been very fortunate; I think it is very difficult for a famous woman,” was her own comment on married life when talking to reporters in San Sebastian last month.
She is survived by one daughter, as well as two adopted children.
Bette Davis, film star, was born on April 5, 1908. She died on October 6, 1989, aged 81.
PROFESSOR DAPHNE JACKSON
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PHYSICS PROFESSOR WHO TIRELESSLY PROMOTED CAREERS IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING FOR WOMEN AND SCHOOLGIRLS
FEBRUARY 14, 1991
When, in 1971, Daphne Jackson was appointed professor of physics at Surrey University she was the only woman professor of physics in the United Kingdom and was to remain so for many years. As well as doing distinguished work in nuclear, medical and radiation physics, she exerted herself to make the sciences an attractive career for women and was active, for example, in seeking ways and means to enable women who had had to bring up children to return to professions in the scientific world.
Daphne Jackson was educated at Peterborough County Grammar School for Girls and at Imperial College, London, where she read physics. In 1958 she moved to Battersea College of Technology as a research assistant in physics. There she began to research in theoretical nuclear physics with Professor Lewis Elton. She became a lecturer at Battersea in 1960 and was awarded her PhD in 1962. In 1967 she was promoted to reader in physics at the University of Surrey (as Battersea had by then become). She was dean of the faculty of science from 1977 to 1980 and from 1984 to 1988. Her publications included Nuclear Reactions (with R. C. Barrett, 1970), Nuclear Sizes and Structure (1977) and Imaging with Ionising Radiations (with K. Kouris and N. M. Spyrou, 1982) besides many contributions to learned journals. The latter consisted not only of papers on nuclear science but also contributions to the debate on education and science policy.
Besides her scientific work Daphne Jackson was greatly in demand to provide advice and guidance to numerous bodies. These covered a wide range of interests and activities, in both the professional and public domain; to mention but a few: the Science and Engineering Research Council, the National Radiological Protection Board, the Civil Service Commission final selection board, local health authorities, the Department of Energy and the Meteorological Office. But she will perhaps be best remembered for her work with the Women’s Engineering Society of which she was president from 1983 to 1985.
She was tireless in her efforts to promote the idea that a career in science and engineering could be exciting to women, and carried her gospel energetically into the schools. She personally raised substantial sums from industry to support her Women Returners Scheme, which provided flexible, part-time fellowships for women qualified in science and engineering who wanted to return to their profession after a career break. In recognition of her work in this area she was appointed OBE in 1987 and she also received honorary doctorates from the Open University and from Exeter and Loughborough universities.
Although very much in demand outside the university, Daphne Jackson also worked long and hard within. She firmly believed that a head of department should teach undergraduates, particularly in the first year, so that they got to know her and could approach her if they had any difficulties. She was a fine research leader and the fact that Surrey’s physics department was rated very highly in both of the UGC’s research selectivity exercises owed much to her high standards and leadership. She promoted close links with schools not only to encourage greater numbers to consider a career in science but also to inculcate the idea of the University of Surrey as an exciting place to study. She was also active in providing advice on public relations about which she had a great deal of personal knowledge since she had a gift to express complex scientific information in a way which the general public could understand and hence was much in demand by the media. Among the recreations she listed in her Who’s Who entry was “encouraging women in science education”.
Although she had suffered from cancer for some years, it was only in December of last year that she became seriously ill and even then she worked from home until last week. She was unmarried.
Professor Daphne Jackson, OBE, physicist and campaigner for scientific education, was born on September 23, 1936. She died of cancer on February 8, 1991, aged 54
DAME MARGOT FONTEYN
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BALLERINA OF OUTSTANDING LYRICAL GIFTS AND CONSUMMATE ARTISTRY
FEBRUARY 22, 1991
Dame Margot Fonteyn, the ballerina, died yesterday in Panama City aged 71. She was born at Reigate, Surrey, on May 18, 1919.
Margot Fonteyn was one of the great dancers not just of her own time but of all time; her name will live as surely in the history of ballet as those of Taglioni and Pavlova. She was also one of the rare artists whose names mean as much to the ordinary man and woman as to the devotees of their own particular art. Many dancers have excelled her in virtuosity or in the theatrical intensity they brought to dramatic roles. Fonteyn’s special gift was for grasping completely the intention and balance of the dance and the music and bringing them to life for the audience. She never lost the enthusiasm which marked her dancing from childhood, and the ability to communicate her own enjoyment was perhaps the supreme secret of her art.
During the course of an extraordinarily long career she brought that gift to ever wider audiences in many parts of the world where she performed on stage; millions more saw her on television or in films. Consequently, even more than Anna Pavlova in the early years of this century, Fonteyn awakened a love of dance in untold thousands of spectators.
She was born Margaret Hookham, the child of an English father and a mother half Irish, half Brazilian. She claimed to have inherited her enthusiasm and response to rhythm and music from her mother; and from her father the tenacity and perfectionism to put those qualities to use. From the age of four she attended dancing classes with a local teacher, and continued them in various places abroad where her father’s work as an engineer took the family. The liveliness of character dancing attracted her more than the pure classicism which was later to bring her fame.
It was not until she saw Alicia Markova dance Les Sylphides during a visit home in 1931 that Peggy Hookham became really ambitious to be a dancer herself. Her father was then working in China and the child was lucky in finding an exceptionally gifted teacher, George Goncharov, in Shanghai. After two years with him she returned to England and studied with Seraphine Astafieva (Markova’s teacher) before joining the Vic-Wells Ballet School in 1934. Within a few weeks she was performing with the Vic-Wells Ballet, and before the year was out she had her first solo role as the child in Ninette de Valois’s The Haunted Ballroom, under an interim version of her stage name, Margot Fontes.
Before her sixteenth birthday Frederick Ashton gave Fonteyn the leading part in a new production of Rio Grande, and when Markova left the company soon afterwards, Fonteyn was one of the dancers who shared the ballerina’s roles among them. It did not take long for her to emerge as the front runner, and by the time she was 20 Fonteyn had danced the lead in three of the great classics, Giselle, Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty, besides creating roles in a series of ballets by Ashton: Le Baiser de la fée, Apparitions, Nocturne, Les Patineurs, A Wedding Bouquet and Horoscope.
Fonteyn was fortunate in the colleagues under whose professional influence she found herself at this time. De Valois, directing the young company, had a far-sighted grasp of strategy in repertoire and casting. Ashton, choosing Fonteyn as his new muse in the flush of his youthful creative energy, developed her interpretative gifts and also advised her on how to dress and behave off-stage. She had Robert Helpmann as her most frequent partner, a man with a keen theatrical flair, and the company�
�s music director, Constant Lambert, a man of wide culture, took her particularly under his wing.
The outbreak of war in 1939 brought a more urgent tempo to the company’s work. Instead of only two or three performances a week, they began dancing nightly, with matinées besides, to provide entertainment for war workers and troops on leave; long gruelling tours were undertaken between short London seasons. The company was in Holland at the time of the German invasion and escaped with nothing more than what the dancers stood up in. Fonteyn by now was the company’s undisputed ballerina, with a consequent demand for her to appear as often as possible. And there were still new roles to add, most notably two by Ashton which extended her range with the passion of Dante Sonata and the glitter of The Wanderer.
This experience must have helped develop the stamina that made her later career possible, but at the time it did more to consolidate her talent than to advance her artistry. The performances she gave in The Sleeping Beauty when the ballet moved to Covent Garden in 1946 seemed impressive at the time but would be only promising by today’s standards. Luckily Ashton created in Symphonic Variations a work that showed Fonteyn’s lyrical gifts to supreme advantage.
A turning point in her career came in 1948 when she went as guest artist to Paris to create the role of Agathe, the cat-woman, in Roland Petit’s Les Demoiselles de la Nuit. The frank admiration of this glamorous young choreographer, and being treated as a star, seemed to add a new assurance and crispness to everything she did on returning to London. The acclaim she received in New York the next year, opening the Sadler’s Wells Ballet’s first season there with The Sleeping Beauty, completed the transformation into a ballerina of international quality.
