All About Eve (1950) is one of the great films about the theatre, and Bette Davis is at its centre as Margo Channing, a celebrated stage star facing the arrival of a younger admirer.
Margo is witty, vulnerable and fiercely intelligent. Davis played her with a command that made Margo’s fear of ageing feel real, not merely theatrical. Opposite Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, Davis created a duel of manners and ambition that still crackles today.
The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Davis’s performance remains its beating heart. Margo Channing is a role that could have been a caricature, but in Davis’s hands she became a fully human star: funny, flawed and impossible to forget.
Image: Bette Davis in Photoplay, June 1938, Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bette_Davis_-_Photoplay,_June_1938.jpg