Bette Davis

Pencil Portrait by Antonio Bosano.

Bette Davis Pencil Portrait
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The quality of the prints are at a much higher level compared to the image shown on the left.

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A3 Pencil Print-Price £45.00-Purchase

A4 Pencil Print-Price £30.00-Purchase

*Limited edition run of 250 prints only*

All Pencil Prints are printed on the finest Bockingford Somerset Velvet 255 gsm paper.

P&P is not included in the above prices.

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Last Update : 15/4/15

Bereft of a gorgeous face or an eye catching figure, Bette Davis was nonetheless a spellbinding talent and, in my humble opinion, the greatest actress of them all.

As Charlotte Vale, the spinster who defies her domineering mother to discover love, heartbreak and eventual contentment in ‘Now Voyager’, she embodies the very essence of repressed dreams in the ultimate Hollywood melodrama. In ‘Whatever happened to Baby Jane’, she is grotesquely made-up gargoyle with long blonde ringlets, standing over her slumped, crippled sister, viciously kicking her from head to foot and in the process scaring me witless. I was twelve when I first saw the movie, and her character’s gradual descent into insanity unnerved me more than any season of Hammer Horror movies.

Best of all, there was Margo Channing, the highly regarded yet aging Broadway star of ‘All About Eve,’ who can see right through Eve Harrington’s insincerity. Depressed by her 40th birthday, any acknowledgement of her fifth decade makes her “feel as if I’ve taken all my clothes off.” She looks at her longtime director and bitterly complains: “Bill’s 32. He looks 32. He looked it five years ago. He’ll look it 20 years from now. I hate men.”

Recommended viewing

All about Eve (1950)

“Funny business, a woman’s career – the things you drop on your way up the ladder so you can move faster. You forget you’ll need them again when you get back to being a woman. That’s one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not: being a woman. Sooner or later, we’ve got to work at it, no matter how many other careers we’ve had or wanted. And in the last analysis, nothing’s any good unless you can look up just before dinner or turn around in bed, and there he is. Without that, you’re not a woman. You’re something with a French provincial office or a book full of clippings, but you’re not a woman.”

Bette Davis is Margo Channing, an actress in her twilight years but still hankering after adulation. She takes in an adoring young fan Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), but gradually realises that her acolyte is using her to get to the top, something she is poweless to stop.

I reacquainted myself with the film in 2015, years after I had last seen it. Available to purchase for the ‘princely sum of £1.99,’ there it was on the shelf, standing proudly amongst the inevitable selection of milennium dated junk, films I would not find the time to watch even if my maker offered me another lifetime. Everyone should see this movie for its encapsulation of human motivation, and the thirst for fame.

Writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz manages to create an engaging story with memorable characters, and tie them together with some of the sharpest dialogue ever to reach the screen. Every member of the ensemble cast delivers, the combined effect more than sufficient to elevate the film into a rarified atmosphere reserved for celluloid immortals. Forget the period feel and its look at post war American life, it’s a film that could have been made at anytime in the last sixty five years without feeling dated. Its central themes remain eternal. As the noted film critic Roger Ebert so succinctly put it, “growing older was a smart career move for Bette Davis, whose personality was adult, hard-edged and knowing. Never entirely comfortable as an ingenue, she was glorious as a professional woman, a survivor, or a bitchy predator. Her veteran actress Margo Channing in “All About Eve” (1950) was her greatest role; it seems to show her defeated by the wiles of a younger actress, but in fact marks a victory: the triumph of personality and will over the superficial power of beauty. She never played a more autobiographical role.”

The Writers Guild of America published this list of the 101 Greatest Screenplays Ever Written.

According to the WGA, the top ten scripts of all time are:

10. The Godfather: Part II

9. Some Like it Hot

8. Network

7. Sunset Boulevard

6. Annie Hall

5. All About Eve

4. Citizen Kane

3. Chinatown

2. The Godfather

1. Casablanca

The full scripts to “All about Eve” can be located at:

http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/all_about_eve.html