"If you're a star you don't stop being a star."
Margaret (Bette Davis)
It is human nature, I suppose, to be reluctant to give up anything that is comfortable and familiar — whatever it may be.
People who have been in the public spotlight — athletes, politicians, movie stars — seem particularly stubborn about acknowledging the ravages of time or the fickleness of followers. Their resistance is doomed to failure, of course, and most of them probably already know that the batting average for those who preceded them is roughly .000, but they always seem to think that they will be the exception.
Bette Davis played such a character in "The Star," which premiered on this day in 1952. There was an ironic twist to the casting — but I'll come back to that.
Davis' character had once been an in–demand Hollywood star whose latest movies always drew long lines at the box office, an Academy Award winner, but that was when she was young and beautiful. Davis still saw herself that way, but the moviegoing public did not. (Davis, by the way, was 44 when the movie premiered and more than 20 years removed from her own big–screen debut.)
Davis' character clearly was in the stages of grief later described by Elisabeth Kübler–Ross. Mostly in "The Star," she alternated between the anger and denial stages, but there was a generous helping of depression and even a bit of bargaining involved.
Ultimately all that was followed by the acceptance stage, but it came at the very end, and the audience had to go through that journey with Davis. It was the point of the movie.
Davis' character, who apparently hadn't been in a movie for quite awhile and was forced to sell many of her most valuable possessions to pay her debts, was offered a small role that was completely at odds with her self–image — the role of the older sister of a younger, sexier character (played by the latest Hollywood sex symbol).
In her screen test, Davis' character figured she could snag the starring role by putting a sexy spin on her performance. But that — predictably — was a dismal failure, and Davis realized what Sterling Hayden (a former actor Davis had helped once) and a young Natalie Wood (14 when "The Star" premiered and cast as Davis' daughter) had been trying to tell her.
Her career was over. It was time to decide what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
Wood's role was definitely a supporting one — and not really all that big, even for a supporting role — but symbolically she represented the future, Hollywood's real–life next generation — in many ways like Davis' younger rival in "The Star."
Davis did receive her ninth Best Actress nomination (she lost to Shirley Booth) but would be so honored only once more in her lifetime — for "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"
Wood, on the other hand, received only three Oscar nominations and rarely received praise for what she did, but she seldom lacked for work in her comparatively brief career.
