Bette Davis1990

In a career that spanned almost sixty years, Bette Davis made more than eighty films. Not for nothing was she called the Queen of Hollywood. And she had her own, unique style. What she wanted to do was to act -- and this meant rejecting the glamor image that Hollywood wanted for its young stars; it meant fighting for the roles she knew were right for her; it meant quarrels with studios, with directors, with her leading men. But she succeeded and, after winning two Oscars, she appeared in an unforgettable sequence of dramas, from Dark Victory to All About Eve. Unlike many of her contemporaries, she refused to rest on her laurels as she grew into middle-age, but continually sought scripts that would give her something to bite on. The result was another sequence of memorable movies, including Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Bette Davis worked all over the world, and in her later years she lent her power to all-star epics such as Death on the Nile and her last film The Whales of August, which appeared in 1988 -- a year before her death. This lavishly illustrated biogrpahy tells the story of a star the like of whom we shall not see again.