Jezebel (1938) gave Bette Davis her second Academy Award for Best Actress, and it gave her one of her most famous screen creations: Julie Marsden.
Set in New Orleans in the 1850s, the film follows Julie, a headstrong Southern belle who defies convention by wearing a red dress to a ball where unmarried women were expected to wear white. Her pride costs her the love of Preston Dillard, played by Henry Fonda, and the rest of the film traces the consequences of that defiance.
Davis played Julie with a mixture of fire and remorse. She was never simply a villain or a victim. The performance moves from wilful charm to a kind of moral reckoning, and it showed how much Davis could suggest with a look or a pause.
The film was made as a kind of answer to Gone with the Wind, which Davis had hoped to star in, and it became a triumph in its own right. Julie Marsden remains a defining Davis role: a woman who breaks the rules, pays for it, and refuses to disappear quietly.
Image: Bette Davis in Photoplay, June 1938, Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bette_Davis_-_Photoplay,_June_1938.jpg