‘Wicked Stepmother’: an embarrassing end to Bette Davis’ iconic career
It is very hard for actors and filmmakers who are pioneers in their professions to end on a high note. Orson Welles made Citizen Kane at the beginning of his career. Chantal Akerman made Jeanne Dielman four decades before her final film. And Robert De Niro is highly unlikely (especially given the calibre of his most recent movies) to top Taxi Driver or Raging Bull.
Often, the last project in the career of a great artist is forgettable – neither groundbreaking nor cringe-worthy. Eyes Wide Shut is not Stanley Kubrick’s most impressive film by any means, but it is better than some of his earlier movies. 1994’s Love Affair isn’t the greatest movie of all time either, but it’s a mildly effective romance that allowed Katharine Hepburn to fade gracefully into the rearview mirror of cinema.
Then, there are the unlucky giants who leave their worst film for last, and Bette Davis is sadly near the top of that list. She was a tireless workaholic who refused to be relegated to history many times throughout her career. She received 11 Oscar nominations, including eight before the age of 40. She won two – first for Dangerous in 1936 and second for Jezebel in 1939. She was a trailblazer both on-screen and off, portraying complex, sometimes even villainous, women and challenging the studio system that treated actors as fungible commodities.
Every time the industry tried to set her out to pasture, Davis flatly refused to comply. In 1950, after being labelled a has-been, she starred in All About Eve, one of the greatest films ever made, featuring her greatest performance. More than a decade later, just when she had been relegated to the dustbin yet again, she pivoted to low-budget horror movies, earning an Oscar nomination for her role in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?.
Towards the end of her life, Davis continued to refuse retirement, which, unfortunately, led to her worst and final film. 1989’s Wicked Stepmother is a comedy-horror movie directed by Larry Cohen about a witch (Davis) who marries a hapless bachelor while his daughter and son-in-law are on vacation. She proceeds to tear his life to shreds with the help of her daughter (Barbara Carrera), who takes over her physical form.
In true Davis fashion, she managed to assert complete control over her involvement in the project, even in the worst of circumstances. Realising where the production was headed, she walked off the set and refused to come back. In the original script, there wasn’t supposed to be a daughter character, but after the Oscar winner left, there was no other option but to write a second version of the stepmother.
Cohen later claimed that Davis refused to return to set because of ill health. She had undergone a mastectomy six years before and suffered several strokes shortly thereafter, but that hadn’t kept her from making several other films between 1986 and 1989. Irritated by Cohen’s version of events, Davis went to the press.
“I would be ashamed to have people think I sanctioned something like this,” she said of the film in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. “People will be horrified at the footage of me.” She explained that it was important for the future of her career to make it known that she was in perfectly good shape to continue working. “I love my profession,” the 80-year-old said. “I would never stop. Relax? I relax when I work. It’s my life.” She died later that year.
While it is unfortunate that Davis’s final film was such a terrible one, there is something powerful and even a little inspiring about the fact that, even in the worst of circumstances, she managed to do the work on her own terms, even if that meant walking away.
