American actress Bette Davis was BOTD in 1908. Born Ruth Elizabeth Davis in Lowell, Massachusetts, she was educated in a series of Spartan boarding schools, before moving to New York City with her mother in 1921. Intent on becoming an actress, she performed in summer stock before making her Broadway debut in 1929. Signed to a Hollywood contract, her early film career was unremarkable until her starring role in the 1934 film adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham‘s novel Of Human Bondage, playing a manipulative and amoral waitress. Her exclusion from that year’s Oscar best actress race caused an outcry in Hollywood, prompting the Academy to alter the rules to allow her inclusion. She won an Oscar the following year for the film Dangerous, widely considered to be a make-up prize. After failing to secure the role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, she played another rebellious Southern Belle in the 1936 film Jezebel, winning her second Oscar. After a dispute with Warner Brothers over her contract conditions, she moved to England, shaving her eyebrows to play an elderly Queen Elizabeth I in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Returning to Hollywood, she burned through the 1940s playing bad bitches and tough broads in The Letter, The Little Foxes, Now, Voyager and Mr Skeffington, dazzling audiences with her forceful acting style and combative persona. After a fallow period in which she was overtaken by other actresses (including her sometime rival Joan Crawford) she left Warner Brothers in 1949. She staged a spectacular comeback in 1950’s All About Eve, playing a stage actress whose career and relationships are supplanted by her ambitious protégée. The quality of her roles declined in the 1950s, though her performance as an ageing child star in camp horror flick Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, opposite Crawford, earned her a record-breaking 10th Oscar nomination. In later life, she appeared mainly in low-budget “hagsploitation” films, notably Hush… Hush Sweet Charlotte, The Nanny, The Anniversary and Burnt Offerings. She became a popular guest on 1970s talk shows, croaking out anecdotes with a cigarette in hand, and made vivid appearances in 1978’s Death on the Nile and 1987’s The Whales of August. Married and divorced four times, she had three children, including B. D. Hyman, whose 1985 memoir My Mother’s Keeper condemned Davis as an alcoholic bully. Devastated by the betrayal, Davis disinherited B.D. and they never spoke again. Amused by her status as a camp icon, Davis surrounding herself with adoring gay men who designed her gowns, emptied her ashtrays and kept her company in old age. She died in 1989 aged 81. Kim Carnes’ song Bette Davis Eyes and Madonna’s Vogue re-introduced her to the MTV generation. Her relationship with Crawford was vividly dramatised in the 2017 television series Feud: Bette and Joan, starring Susan Sarandon as Davis.