One of my favorite classic screen divas, Bette Davis, will be honored on Thursday with a 42-cent commemorative stamp. The stamp features the actress as she appeared in the 1950 film All About Eve. In the classic movie, she portrays an aging stage actress defending her career from a pushy young starlet.
In case there's some clueless fag out there who has NEVER seen a Bette Davis film (damn you to hell if you haven't), Davis starred in more than one hundred films since her early start, during which she won acclaim for playing tough unsympathetic characters, and during her career she was nominated for more than ten of her roles. She won an Oscar in 1935 for Dangerous and in 1938 for Jezebel.
Aging with grace and style, she used the experience her years had earned her to portray a tormented former child star in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane, garnering yet another Oscar nomination.
She was the ORIGINAL drama queen, serving it up will style and grace that Kim KardASShian or Paris Hilton could only dream of, Davis was rumored to be occasionally difficult to work with and was even involved in a feud with fellow diva Joan Crawford, which both denied.
Davis died in France in 1989, choosing the epitaph "She did it the hard way" to celebrate her perseverance and success as a woman in a male-dominated industry. She was, after all, the first woman to be honored with the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award and the first woman to be president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Her son, Michael Merrill, said of the postage stamp commemoration, "She would have been tremendously thrilled."
Now that I've given you a Bette Davis edumacation lecture, make sure you go out and get some of her films. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be getting my ass down to the post office to purchase some Bette Davis stamps.
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