The actor Bette Davis called the “finest I ever worked with”
Bette Davis was never one to hold back her opinions, good or bad. Her legendary feuds with co-stars like Faye Dunaway – and most famously Joan Crawford – made her one of Hollywood’s most talked-about leading ladies. But the sharp-tongued reputation she built may have overshadowed a key part of her legacy: she genuinely admired many of the people she worked with, too.
Despite her combative reputation, Davis was often as prone to lavishing praise on her Hollywood colleagues as she was scorn. For instance, she was effusive in her compliments about Olivia de Havilland and Joan Blondell, while she confessed to being jealous of Katharine Hepburn’s talents. Similarly, she was intimidated to work with an acting force like Maggie Smith, and once told Ruth Chatterton, “I’m so damned scared of you, I’m speechless!”
As for her leading men, Davis was fond of James Stewart, Charles Boyer, and James Cagney. She loved George Brent, who co-starred with her in 12 pictures, once remarking that he had an “infectious giggle.” The pair developed a real-life romance, and in 1940, he proposed marriage, but by that point, she already had her eyes on her second husband, Arthur Farnsworth.
As for the best male co-star she had in her career, Davis was split between two options. You see, she once dubbed Claude Rains her “favourite person to work with”, having made four films with the Invisible Man star, including Juarez and Deception. However, he wasn’t who she named “the finest actor I ever worked with” – instead, that honour was bestowed upon Spencer Tracy.
Fascinatingly, Davis and Tracy – the first actor to win two consecutive ‘Best Actor’ Oscars – only shared the screen once. In the 1932 feature 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, he played an inmate in the infamous prison obsessed with breaking out, while she portrayed the girlfriend who regularly visits him. At this point in their careers, both stars were inexperienced, with Tracy only beginning work in Hollywood two years earlier, while Davis only received her first credit a year before.
Despite being so green to moviemaking, though, the two young actors made a lasting impression on each other. She was struck by his performance in the picture, which came five years before his first Oscar nomination, but just like with Brent, their relationship was more than just business. “Spence and I were smitten with each other,” she once confessed. “He didn’t have to pretend he was strong, because he was strong. But, oh, he could be tender, too.”
Ultimately, Davis and Tracy didn’t build a lasting romantic entanglement, but the stage seemed set for them to continue collaborating on films. Unfortunately, fate conspired against them for the rest of their careers, and they were never able to share the screen again, even though they desperately wanted to. Instead, they were forced to settle for co-starring in a radio version of Dark Victory in 1940, the same year Davis was nominated for ‘Best Actress’ for her lead role in the 1939 melodrama.
What would that second Davis/Tracy collaboration have looked like? It’s a question that has the potential to plague cinephiles everywhere, because it can’t be denied that their one film together came too early to truly display either star at the height of their powers. It would have been electric to see them together in the early ’40s, when both were at the top of their game, or even in the ’60s, when Davis had a late-career resurgence with Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Tracy did the same with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
