Best Actress Ranking - Update

Here is a new update. The newly added performance is highlighted in bold. 

If five performances from the same year are included, the winning performance is higlighted in red.

1. Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind (1939)
2. Jessica Lange in Frances (1982)
3. Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard (1950)
4. Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress (1949)
5. Anne Bancroft in The Graduate (1967)
6. Janet Gaynor in Seventh Heaven (1927-1928)   
7. Jill Clayburgh in An Unmarried Woman (1978)
8. Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
9. Geraldine Page in The Trip to Bountiful (1985)
10. Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise (1991)

11. Katharine Hepburn in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
12. Edith Evans in The Whisperers (1967)
13. Norma Shearer in Marie Antoinette (1938)
14. Greta Garbo in Ninotchka (1939)
15. Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
16. Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth (1998)
17. Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
18. Simone Signoret in Room at the Top (1959)
19. Bette Davis in The Little Foxes (1941)
20. Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965)

21. Rosalind Russell in Auntie Mame (1958)
22. Glenda Jackson in Women in Love (1970)
23. Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve (1957)
24. Elizabeth Taylor in Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
25. Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire (1941)
26. Emily Watson in Hilary and Jackie (1998)
27. Julie Christie in Away from Her (2007)
28. Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun (1951)
29. Audrey Hepburn in Wait until Dark (1967)
30. Meryl Streep in The Devil wears Prada (2006)

31. Ingrid Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945)
32. Anne Baxter in All about Eve (1950)
33. Judi Dench in Mrs. Brown (1997)
34. Helen Hayes in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1932)
35. Jane Fonda in Coming Home (1978)
36. Greer Garson in Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939)
37. Doris Day in Pillow Talk (1959)
38. Meryl Streep in One True Thing (1998)
39. Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear (1952)
40. Deborah Kerr in From Here to Eternity (1953)

41. Katharine Hepburn in Guess who’s coming to dinner (1967)
42. Marsha Mason in Chapter Two (1979)
43. Jane Wyman in The Yearling (1946)
44. Martha Scott in Our Town (1940)
45. Teresa Wright in The Pride of the Yankees (1942) 
46. Jennifer Jones in Love Letters (1945)
47. Ellen Burstyn in Same Time, Next Year (1978)
48. Susan Hayward in My Foolish Heart (1949)
49. Eleanor Parker in Detective Story (1951)
50. Vanessa Redgrave in Mary, Queen of Scots (1971)

51. Diane Keaton in Marvin's Room (1996)
52. Loretta Young in Come to the Stable (1949)  
53. Mary Pickford in Coquette (1928-29)
54. Sissy Spacek in The River (1984)
55. Shirley MacLaine in The Turning Point (1977)
56. Irene Dunne in Cimarron (1930-1931)
57. Ruth Chatterton in Madame X (1928-29)
58. Diana Wynyard in Cavalcade (1932-1933)
59. Bette Davis in The Star (1952)

Bette Davis as Margaret Elliot in The Star

This decision was obviously a very difficult decision because placing a performance last in a ranking (even if the ranking is far from finished so who knows where the performance will be in the end) is never pleasant. And it becomes even more difficult considering that I am not talking about some unknown performer who might have been lucky with an undeserved nomination but rather one of the greatest actresses of the 20th century – how can she be last? And on top of that, with this placement I seem to contradict some of my own reasons from the past. In the case of Mary Pickford, I decided to not rank her last despite an often disastrous performance simply because she had an entertaining factor and always remained watchable, even during her bad moments while the performances below her felt completely uninspired to me. And if I want to be completely fair, then yes, I have to admit that Bette Davis in The Star is also entertaining – after all, this movie is about a washed-up former movie star who dreams of a comeback and takes her Oscar statuette for a drunken car ride around town. How could I not love this? But the thing is – Coquette, a dreadful movie, totally depended on Mary Pickford’s performance and whatever good moments came out of it, happened only of her. In the case of The Star, a movie not much less dreadful than Coquette, all the entertaining factors come from the screenplay. Again, it’s not a good screenplay but if you love old Hollywood and backstage dramas without thinking too much, then yes, it delivers – but Bette Davis is not necessarily the reason for this.

In the end, everything about my ranking is obviously extremely subjective but my final decision on her position was simply based on this: of all the performances that I have ranked so far, Bette Davis’s work in The Star is the only one that I would describe as “lazy”. In the case of Diana Wynard or Ruth Chatterton, even if their actual acting left a lot do be desired, I at least got the feeling that they thought about their characters and tried to go a bit deeper or at least had some idea about what kind of person they want to represent. In the case of Bette Davis, you get the feeling that she simply showed up, did her “Bette Davis-thing” and went home again. I never like to accuse actors of “playing themselves” or similar criticism, but in this case, it just feels strangely true. If the role in The Star had been played by another actress and you would wonder “How would Bette Davis have played that part?”, you get your answer right here – because every mannerism, every line, every single moment in The Star is delivered exactly in the way you imagine Bette Davis would deliver them. There is nothing surprising, no depth, nothing of the maturity from All about Eve or the playfulness of her earlier work. Bette Davis simply took this part and seemed to think "You want Bette Davis? I give you more Bette Davis than you can handle!" and that way ended with a performance that feels uninspired and unoriginal at every moment. And this is why everything about this work just feels “lazy”.

All about Eve feels like a good reference in this review. I am pretty sure that there were comparisons when The Star came out and it does feel inevitably to compare Margo Channing and Margret Elliot – both played by Bette Davis only two years apart, both Oscar-nominated performances that show an actress with many problems. But while All about Eve is obviously a masterpiece that offered Bette Davis a very multidimensional character, The Star is essentially just a B-movie that might seem to offer a great part because Margaret Elliot is basically in every scene of the picture and gets many “big moments”, but it’s actually a very thin part, in no way helped by Bette Davis’s uninspired performance.

The Star begins with an auction where the belongings of Margaret Elliot are sold. One of the buyers is her agent who apparently has no problem to benefit from Margaret’s misery. The scene that follows shows that Margaret doesn’t get any more parts and is too old for the one part she would like. This scene also sets up a pattern for the other scenes that follow – Margaret asks to borrow some money, is denied and then angrily tells how much money she has given over the past. This happens with her agent, the new wife of her ex-husband and her sister and brother-in-law. And in all cases, Bette Davis makes one thing very clear: Margaret is mad. Bette Davis basically starts shouting the moment the movie begins, widening her eyes in anger, spitting out the words at every opportunity. And she will stay on this one note for pretty much the entire picture – as I said earlier, if you would create a Bette Davis performance in your mind simply based on the mannerism you know, the performance in The Star would be the outcome.

The sad truth is that none of these big emotional moments have any impact on the viewer or make Margaret in any way interesting as a character. All the fascination from her Margo Channing is completely gone. Her outbursts are far too over-the-top (throwing her sister and brother-in-law out of her apartment while screaming at the top of her lungs or being thrown into jail while screaming “YOU DON’T SEEM TO KNOW WHO I AM”), her crying scenes too theatrical (staying in front of her old house, sobbing “going…going...gone”) while scenes such as joy or love feel completely unbelievable altogether. But the sad truth goes even beyond that as Bette Davis never feels remotely believable as a former movie star – as shocking as it seems but there is nothing “star-like” about her. This might be intentional as Margaret’s best days are over but I would expect a certain amount of star quality nonetheless.

Another difference between The Star and All about Eve is how the movie treats its central character – All about Eve understood the worries and problems of Margo and presented them in a way that made her character understandable even in her most childish moments. The Star, while putting much more focus on Margaret as its central character than All about Eve did with Margo, often rather treats Margaret as an intruder, a woman who deserves what happened to her and guides her to a completely unsatisfying ending. The movie constantly tells us that Margaret should accept her fate and focus on what is truly important – being a woman and a mother.

Of course, the missteps of the movie are not Bette Davis’s fault but honestly – was there another actress in Hollywood’s golden era less suited to play a part that ends with her running into her lover’s arm, realizing that love is the only thing that matters? Or less suited to play a woman who recognises the importance of her maternal instincts? Hardly – and this harms everything the movie intends to be. This is also due to the fact that Bette Davis and Sterling Hayden are certainly among the most unbelievable lovers in movie history (of course, Sterling Hayden makes a piece of wood look alive in comparison so Bette Davis did not have much to act with here...). They have such a lack of chemistry that I actually missed that they were supposed to be in love and was completely confused by the ending. It’s not only that Sterling Hayden’s literally appears out of nowhere suddenly in the movie but there is nothing between these two actors – the script actually doesn’t give them a lot to work on as Sterling Hayden’s Jim seems more like a big brother but both Bette Davis and he constantly almost seem to ignore each other in their performances (on top of that, even though Bette Davis was only eight years older, they often look like aunt and nephew). Additionally, whenever I think back to The Star, I completely forget Natalie Wood’s presence and the fact that Margaret is supposed to have a daughter because Bette Davis again completely fails to portray this part of Margaret’s life in any believable way.

What amazes me about The Star is why Bette Davis decided to make this movie in the first place (the movie, after all, seems sometimes more designed to promote real-life starlet Barbara Lawrence than its leading lady). Sure, after All about Eve she might have thought that a similar story (even if it really isn’t) might help her to win that desired third Oscar and movies about women learning that a man is more important than a career were surely very common and the role itself offered many flashy scenes that allowed her to go big – but The Star somehow constantly seems to contradict what Bette Davis apparently stood for, the drive for success, the willingness to suffer setbacks and come back again, the importance of her professional life. Most of all, there seems to be one theory that, even though maybe not true, might be the best explanation for all of this: apparently, The Star was based on Joan Crawford and Bette Davis also based her performance on her famous competitor (from certain fashion choices right down to her use of the expression “Bless you”). Looking at this, maybe it all makes sense? Margaret Elliot might have been a great actress (as she states herself “You don’t win an Academy Award for nothing”) but is most of the time only interested in fame and vanity instead of artistry (after all, even her perfume is “the most expensive perfume in the world” – however, it is not too exclusive to be sold on the counter of your friendly drugstore next door in what looks like a 5 litre bottle – and when she thinks she is back on top, the first thing she does is buy new cloths and look at new houses). Is this performance maybe some big inside-joke by Bette Davis? It would make sense from a certain point of view because the movie as well as Bette Davis’s performance enjoy to put all the blame on Margaret – she is told various times that she should move on with her life (meaning stop being an actress and becoming a wife and mother) and her vanity constantly gets in the way of her own success, making her responsible for her own downfall (losing her job at a shopping centre because she is recognized as Margaret Elliot and of course famously ruining her own screen test for an important supporting role because she insists to play the part like a young girl in the hope to be cast as the lead – it’s a scene that is almost surreal because the question is if Bette Davis herself is bad or if she is only acting bad but even if it doesn’t answer this question, it does show that Margaret herself has lost all sense of what she can or can’t do). So, maybe The Star was a message by Bette Davis to Joan Crawford, telling her that she was over-the-hill, that she had lost her talent, that her ego was bigger than her acting abilities and that she would be better off by just leaving acting all together and find the right man (the movie goes so far to have a screenwriter basically lay this all out for Margaret at the end when he tells her about a new script about an actress who has been “denied her birth right. The glory and the privilege of just being a woman”). Of course, this is all speculation but it does provide an answer to some questions that arise during a screening of The Star…

The funny thing is, however, that this meta level can just as easily be attributed to Bette Davis as well. Bette Davis apparently told journalists back then that the whole movie was shot on first takes – similar to the disastrous screen test of Margaret Elliot where she is so bad and so uncooperative that the director decides that one try is enough to which Margaret happily replies “You mean I got it in one take?” This idea of an actress being so sure about what she is doing despite being horribly over-the-top and a director who doesn’t care about it or doesn’t want to argue with this diva might very well apply to the making of The Star as well because so many scenes would have benefitted from another try, from a calmer angle, from a more developed point-of-view but every scene goes for cheap effects, for big and loud, for over-emoting at every chance that it’s easy to believe that these were all first takes. And when Margaret later watches her screen tests and begins to scream “It’s horrible!”, it again reaches a strange meta level as this is was the audience has been yelling at Bette for over an hour already.

As I said at the beginning, I won’t deny that it’s all highly entertaining – who doesn’t love to see Bette Davis yelling “It is a disgrace! Margaret Elliot waiting on a couple of old bags like you!” or grabbing an Oscar, saying “Let’s you and me get drunk!” I also know that most reviews on the Internet think rather highly of this performance, many even comparing if favourably to Margo Channing. From my point of view, it all works on a humours level if you see it as one big “F**k You” from Bette Davis to Joan Crawford (even though Joan’s career was certainly not worse than Bette’s at this point and Joan herself had a better performance in the same year) but from an artistic point-of-view as an Oscar-nominated performance, it’s just a big No.