Bette Davis
Actress
Bette Davis was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis on 5 April 1908 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the daughter of patent attorney Harlow Morrell Davis and Ruth Augusta Favor. Her family had lived in New England for generations, and while genealogical research does trace a thread of Welsh ancestry through the Davis line, it is a distant one, reaching back to the 1500s rather than to any recent immigrant generation. Davis embraced the connection warmly in person on two separate, documented visits to Wales: an earlier trip she described in her 1962 memoir The Lonely Life, and a return visit to Cardiff in October 1975 to perform a one-woman show.
Davis trained at the John Murray Anderson-Robert Milton School of Theatre in New York before breaking into Hollywood in the early 1930s. Signed to Warner Bros., she became known for playing flawed, difficult and often unlikeable women at a time when most leading ladies avoided the risk, repeatedly fighting the studio over the quality of her roles. Her persistence paid off: she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for 'Dangerous' (1935) and again for 'Jezebel' (1938), and went on to receive a record ten Best Actress nominations across her career.
Among her most celebrated films are 'Dark Victory' (1939), 'Now, Voyager' (1942), 'The Corn Is Green' (1945) playing Miss Moffat, an English schoolteacher who moves to a fictional Welsh mining village, in an adaptation of Emlyn Williams' play 'All About Eve' (1950), for which her performance as ageing Broadway star Margo Channing is still regarded as one of the finest in screen history, and 'What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?' (1962), her late-career reinvention opposite old rival Joan Crawford. During the Second World War she co-founded the Hollywood Canteen with fellow actor John Garfield, giving rest and entertainment to servicemen shipping out to the Pacific.
In 1977 Davis became the first woman to receive the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award, and she is ranked second, behind only Katharine Hepburn, on the AFI's list of the greatest female stars of classic Hollywood cinema. She continued working through serious illness in her final years and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, on 6 October 1989. Her Welsh ancestry is a distant thread in a family otherwise rooted in New England for over three hundred years, but it was one she clearly enjoyed in person, on both her real visits to Wales.
Two real visits to Wales
Davis wrote of an earlier trip to Wales in her 1962 memoir The Lonely Life, recalling her struggle with the name of the village Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch — "I have always been a rubber-neck but in Wales I needed a rubber tongue" — and joking that its meaning, once translated, was "a Welsh rarebit." She also wrote of trying and failing to track down a Welsh cousin during the trip: "it was impossible to find a cousin. We wouldn't have been able to communicate anyway."
She returned to Wales in October 1975, giving her one-woman show, In Person and on Film, over two nights at Cardiff's New Theatre. Beforehand, at a press conference at the Angel Hotel, she told local reporters: "It's wonderful to be in Wales, I have been here twice before and I'm in love with it," adding that her own ancestors were Welsh and had simply dropped the 'e' from Davies when they emigrated. During the show's audience Q&A, a fan taught her how to pronounce nos da (good night), which she used to close out the night to rapturous applause.
Davis's early years in Hollywood were marked by open battles with Warner Bros. over casting; she was suspended more than once and in 1936 even sued the studio in a British court in an unsuccessful attempt to break her contract, a case that nonetheless helped push the studio system toward treating its stars more fairly. She was nominated for the Academy Award in five consecutive years between 1938 and 1942, a record that still stands.
Off screen, Davis was married four times and had three children. She remained a famously outspoken, sharp-tongued interviewee well into old age, and her rivalry with Joan Crawford reignited on the set of 'Baby Jane' and later dramatised in the TV series 'Feud' became one of the most discussed off-screen relationships in Hollywood history.
