Bette Davis: 20 Greatest Performances Ranked!

- Davis in the trailer for Dark Victory (1939), in which she gave one of her 11 Oscar-nominated performances.
_______
- To mark the release of a restored version of the classic melodrama Now, Voyager, here is the best of Hollywood’s queen of mean, from screwball romps to wild-eyed chillers. The Guardian, July 29, 2021.

20. Death on the Nile (1978)
Bette Davis was on her final stretch in this Agatha Christie vehicle, with a gallery of A-listers phoning in a souped-up version of their existing screen personae. The scene is a 1930s paddle steamer chugging down the Nile, aboard which a wealthy heiress has been shot: Peter Ustinov’s Hercule Poirot investigates and suspicion falls on a querulous American, Mrs Van Schuyler, played by Davis, who may have wanted to get her gnarled hands on the victim’s pearl necklace.

19. The Star (1952)
This is one of the least-remembered of Davis’s gothic “has-been” roles, something which became a late-career speciality for her – but it did win her an Oscar nomination. She plays Maggie Elliot, a washed-up movie actor who is now broke, failing to get any work and faced with the awful reality of having to get a civilian job in a department store. The story takes an intriguing meta path when she is finally offered a film about an ex-star who can’t come to terms with the end of her career.

18. The Scapegoat (1959)
Working with Alec Guinness and the distinguished British director Robert Hamer in this Daphne du Maurier adaptation, Davis gives us one of her ripest bedridden roles, but with some great staircase work when she wants to come down to make an entrance in the drawing room. Guinness plays a timid Englishman who finds he has an exact double – a mysterious French count who switches places with him and forces him to deal with his family, including the inevitable cantankerous countess (Davis), who is deeply suspicious at her son’s unfathomable new behaviour.

17. Juarez (1939)
Here was a queenly role for Davis in her “melodrama" phase, giving plenty of scope for portraying hauteur, neurosis and an embattled, tragic sense of entitlement. She has no less a title than Queen Carlota of Mexico, the wife of the 19th-century Austrian Archduke Maximilian (Brian Aherne), who has been installed as Mexico’s monarch by Napoleon III (Claude Rains). But this brings Maximilian and Carlota into conflict with the Mexican populist Benito Juaréz, played by Paul Muni, whose American-backed army induces Napoleon to withdraw French forces, leaving the pathetic puppet king and queen exposed. Davis’s Carlota has a desperate, hysterical moment as she returns to Paris to persuade Napoleon to change his mind...

More,
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jul/29/bette-daviss-20-greatest-performances-ranked
_____
Bette Davis, wiki, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bette_Davis