Meet the real Bette and Joan
Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, the film legends at the heart of FX’s eight-episode
Feud: Bette and Joan, ruled the big screen from the 1930s into the 1950s. A primer on the Oscar-winning icons, whose collaboration on 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? launches Feud: . BETTE DAVIS BORN 1908 IN LOWELL, MASS.; DIED 1989 She was considered by many the top film actress of her day, and “she survived because she saw herself as a character actor, which I relate to,” says Susan Sarandon, who plays her.
ACADEMY AWARDS: best supporting actress, Dangerous (1935); best actress, Jezebel (1938)
PORTRAYING DAVIS: “I was so terrified,” Sarandon says. “She’s been mimicked in such extreme ways, and she’s so big that everything you do, you feel like you’re doing a meme. Trying to find a way to make her feel real and not just do every cliché you’ve seen was hard.” FILM HISTORIAN LEONARD MALTIN’S TAKE: “Bette Davis wasn’t compliant in terms of taking typical ingénue roles, so her career was rocky from the start. Then, she gave a jaw-dropping performance in Of Human Bondage. … and everybody took notice.” JOAN CRAWFORD BORN 1906 IN SAN ANTONIO; DIED 1977 She was a beauty who rose in film, starting in 1920s silent films and evolving as times changed. “She represents women in each era, the ’20s, the ’30s, the ’40s, even into the ’50s,” says Jessica Lange, who plays her in Feud. ACADEMY AWARD: best actress, Mildred Pierce (1945)
PORTRAYING CRAWFORD: “The thing about Joan I keep coming back to is the incredible weight she carried from childhood, the terrible abuse (and) poverty. From there, she climbed to the top,” Lange says. “MGM taught her how to walk, how to talk and yet there are moments when you see it all fall away.”
“Crawford MALTIN’S TAKE: continually reinvented her screen image, starting out as a flapper and then becoming a shop girl during the Depression. … (Later), she resuscitated her career in Mildred Pierce, a great part she played to the hilt.” WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?
Baby Jane (TCM, Thursday, 11 ET/8 PT) chronicles the horrors that two sisters, Baby Jane (Davis) and Blanche (Crawford), visit upon each other as they lament long-lost movie careers.
MALTIN’S CRITIQUE: “Whether you label it as camp, and most people do, it’s a compelling film and they’re both great in it.” the episodes.
“What was happening in the studios at the time? Is it the same as what’s happening now in terms of aging? What happens to a woman?” says Sarandon, who sees some improvement but says there is the need for more. “The
Meddler (2016) was the first part I was offered in a long time where I wasn’t either dying, helping someone die or losing (my) mind.”
Murphy says his projects have benefited from casting veteran actresses.
“In this business, you hit 40, and you hit a wall. I hear it from women over and over, not just in Hollywood, but in life. And I always thought that was insane,” he says. “I think they’re tremendously talented and have a lot more stories to tell. … I know other people out there miss them as well, and I’ve been proven right (about) that over and over again.”
In Feud, studio boss Jack Warner (Stanley Tucci) and Baby
Jane director Robert Aldrich (Alfred Molina) manipulate the actresses into a promotable rivalry, aided by gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Judy Davis). Crawford and Davis probably never had the chance to form an alliance, Lange says.
“I think there was probably suspicion and rivalry by nature, because they would have been competing for the same parts, working with the same directors and actors,” she says. “But I think it was exacerbated by the powers that be.”
Feud examines their pain but also the campiness of the dueling divas.
“I didn’t want to laugh at these women; I wanted to feel with them. That was our approach with the scripts,” Murphy says. “But make no mistake, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were larger than life. They were narcissists, and from that comes comedy.”