I only wrote two fan letters in my life. One was to Bette Davis. And one was to Ron Palillo, who played Horshack on 'Welcome Back, Kotter.' And Ron did not write me back, but Bette Davis did.
I loved working with Bette Davis. Bette Davis was great to work with and a wonderful teacher, and very kind to me. We became good friends.
When I first watched Bette Davis in 'All About Eve', I was struck by how much I felt that she is Margo Channing and that she's Bette Davis, where she was able to do both, where you're like, 'What an icon.'
Coming from where I came from, the Midwest, in the era I was born, the '30s, movies were glorious fun - Bette Davis dying or whatever. But whatever they were, they were not serious.
There will be no 'Mommie Dearest' in the lives of my children, and no books like the one the Crosby boy wrote about Bing, or Bette Davis's daughter has written. My children love me very much, and they are loved.
Look, you're either loved or hated. Which is a good thing, as Bette Davis used to say.
I adore Bette Davis and Vivien Leigh, but more because they were good actresses. That’s what makes me interested in them, that they didn’t present themselves as idols; they were just doing their jobs.
I adore Bette Davis and Vivien Leigh, but more because they were good actresses. That's what makes me interested in them, that they didn't present themselves as idols; they were just doing their jobs.
Alongside the statement about one man's poison being another man's high, one might as well add that one man's saint can be another man's sore and one man's hero can turn out to be that man's biggest hangup.
I was very much raised by my grandmother, who actually was Bette Davis - looked like her, acted like her, talked like her. Probably, it was just out of my love and affection for my grandmother that I was interested in Bette.
Joan Crawford and Bette Davis are larger than life. They just are. They sucked all the oxygen out of a room: they're icons; they loom large in our imaginations. But the truth of the matter is both women were diminutive.
I loved Bette Davis when I was little and when I was big and when I got old.
I was the kid that grew up watching Bette Davis films.
I don't think I have the image that say, Judy Garland has, or Bette Davis.
It's weird, because American films in the 1930s and '40s, particularly melodramas, were made for woman, from Bette Davis to Joan Crawford to Barbara Stanwyck to Katherine Hepburn, and for some reason we've taken a step backward in this sense.
Bette Davis had a phrase that called it "cigarette smoking acting" .