The Complete Films of Bette Davis by Gene Ringgold

She's gone from the murderous Regina in ``The Little Foxes'' to the inspiring school teacher, Miss Moffat, in ``The Corn Is Green,'' Emlyn Williams's classic about his Welsh coal-mining childhood. Her roles have ranged from the lethal to the sublime.

Wide open, blue, and penetrating, they are made up with the long-lashed glamour that has been her screen trademark. Blond hair, softly waved, frames the resolute face and the ``Bette Davis Eyes'' that inspired the Kim Carnes hit with that line. She is regal at just over five feet, but much more diminutive than her films suggest: a slip of a woman in a chic black cr^epe dress tiered from waist to hem. Today after nearly six decades as a star, Miss Davis still glitters. This picture's being taken right away from you.' So he behaved much better from then on.''īut perhaps too late: Bette Davis established herself as a Hollywood star in 1934 with that performance. And one day he was crossing the RKO lot, where we were working, and this man said to him, `Mr. He would stand there and mutter the lines into a book. In the beginning of `Bondage' he was so horrified that an American girl was playing it that when he had his lines offstage when I was on camera in a closeup, he would read. ``Well, of course, he was a very fine actor, he did not like films. She talked of him in the familiar throaty voice, clipped as a boxwood hedge: In novelist Somerset Maugham's story, Howard played a promising young doctor whose career was nearly ruined by his obsession for a predatory Cockney waitress (Miss Davis). Viewers will hear inside stories about Miss Davis on the telecast of the Kennedy Center Honors gala Wednesday (CBS, 9-11 p.m.), in which she and the other honorees - violinist Nathan Milstein, entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., singer Perry Como, and modern dance choreographer Alwin Nikolais - are paid spangled tribute by a jury of their peers.īut no story is more typical than the one Davis tells in this interview about the shooting of ``Of Human Bondage'' with English star Leslie Howard. ``It's always so hard to find the room numbers.'' And then Bette Davis - one of the Oscar-crowned queens of Hollywood, 1977 winner of the American Film Institute's Life Achievment Award, and this year's Kennedy Center Honors Award winner - led the way into an interview as candid as a snapshot. Tiny, blond, and indomitable, she waited with her hand on her hip in that inimitable gesture that conjures up dozens of films from the early ``Of Human Bondage'' to this year's ``The Whales of August.'' ``This way,'' she said, welcoming the reporter. BETTE DAVIS, glimpsed from the end of a long hotel corridor, stood backlit against an open door as if in a John Ford film.

The Complete Films of Bette Davis by Gene Ringgold