Bette Davis and Joan Crawford: At a Glance
Shared feature film: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Planned second collaboration: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), which Crawford left during production
Career overlap: Warner Bros., especially after Crawford joined the studio in the 1940s
Documented conflict: Professional competition, hostile remarks, awards-season manoeuvring and a failed second collaboration
Common exaggeration: Treating every injury, casting decision and publicity story as a deliberate attack
Bette Davis in a 1935 studio publicity portrait. Image: Studio Publicity; Public domain.Why the Feud Became Bigger Than the Facts
Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were ideal material for a Hollywood feud. Both were fiercely ambitious, both had survived decades in an industry that treated female stars as replaceable, and both understood publicity. Their screen identities were sharply different. Davis cultivated the image of the actor who would sacrifice beauty for a role. Crawford presented herself as a self-made star whose discipline, glamour and rapport with audiences were part of the performance.
They did not need to be secret friends for the later legend to be exaggerated. There was real rivalry and personal dislike. There were cutting remarks and competitive acts. But many famous stories are repeated without contemporary documentation, while industrial forces disappear from the narrative: studios benefited from competition, gossip columns converted women’s ambition into combat, and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was marketed through the electricity of placing two former queens in the same decaying house.
The Library of Congress announcement adding *Baby Jane* to the National Film Registry calls their feud memorable and recognises the film as their first and only completed pairing. That concise wording is useful. It confirms the rivalry without claiming that every legend is true.
Two Different Routes to Stardom
Joan Crawford rose from poverty and an unstable childhood to become a dancer, silent-film performer and major MGM star. She mastered the machinery of celebrity: photography, fan magazines, fashion and persistent contact with her public. Films such as Our Dancing Daughters, Grand Hotel and The Women made her a symbol of modern female ambition. After MGM released her, she rebuilt her career at Warner Bros. and won the Academy Award for Mildred Pierce.
Bette Davis came from New England, trained for the stage and fought Warner Bros. for stronger roles. Her performances in Of Human Bondage, Dangerous, Jezebel, Dark Victory, The Letter and The Little Foxes established a reputation for emotional fearlessness. She won Oscars for Dangerous and Jezebel and became the first woman to serve as president of the Academy.
These identities contained truth, but they were also strategic. Crawford was a serious actor as well as a glamour star. Davis cared about image as well as craft. The feud narrative depends on making them opposites more absolute than they were.
Warner Bros. and Professional Competition
Crawford arrived at Warner Bros. in the 1940s after Davis had spent years as the studio’s most important female star. By then Davis’s relationship with the company was strained. Crawford’s success in Mildred Pierce demonstrated that the studio could build major prestige vehicles around another mature actress.
Competition for roles was real, but it did not begin as a single dramatic confrontation. It accumulated through casting, billing, reviews, awards and the knowledge that Hollywood offered fewer substantial parts to women as they aged. The rivalry is therefore partly a labour story. Two powerful performers were encouraged to view opportunity as scarce because it was scarce.
Later interviews contain hostile comments from both women. Those remarks should be read as evidence of dislike, but also as performances given after the feud had become part of each star’s public value. A memorable insult travels farther than a complicated professional judgment.
Joan Crawford in a 1945 publicity image for Mildred Pierce. Image: Unknown author; Public domain.Why What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Happened
By the early 1960s, both stars needed a major theatrical success. Crawford brought Henry Farrell’s novel What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? to director Robert Aldrich. The story of two ageing sisters—one a former child star, the other a former movie star—offered roles that turned Hollywood’s fear of ageing actresses into the subject of a film.
The AFI Catalog production history records that Aldrich was intrigued by the idea of co-starring Davis and Crawford. Their casting was not incidental; the audience’s knowledge of their careers added a second story beneath the plot.
Davis plays Jane Hudson, a former vaudeville child star whose adult career failed. Crawford plays Blanche Hudson, a former film star confined to a wheelchair and dependent on her sister. The film uses grotesque make-up, violence and black comedy, but its most disturbing subject is professional obsolescence. These women have been trained to need an audience, then abandoned by the industry that trained them.
What Happened on the Set
Accounts of the production agree that the atmosphere was competitive. Davis and Crawford approached performance differently and were alert to every issue of billing, appearance and control. Davis designed Jane’s startling make-up and pushed the role toward grotesque theatricality. Crawford made Blanche controlled, watchful and emotionally legible.
The most repeated set stories concern physical scenes: claims that Davis genuinely kicked Crawford, or that Crawford made herself unusually heavy for Davis to drag. Some version of on-set discomfort is plausible, and participants later described tensions. But retellings often increase in precision and cruelty as they move farther from the production. Unless an anecdote can be tied to a reliable source, it should be described as reported rather than proven.
What the finished film proves is artistic competition. Davis gives the more flamboyant performance; Crawford provides the still centre that keeps the story from becoming a one-woman display. Each needs the other.
Success, Oscar Nominations and Anne Bancroft’s Award
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? became a commercial success and restored both stars to the centre of popular conversation. Davis received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress; Crawford did not. The Academy Awards database lists the nomination as Davis’s tenth official acting nomination.
Crawford offered to accept the award for absent nominees, and when Anne Bancroft won for The Miracle Worker, Crawford walked onstage to receive it on Bancroft’s behalf. The act was within awards protocol, but it was also brilliant theatre. Crawford obtained the triumphant image that Davis had hoped would belong to her.
Was Crawford’s campaign solely an attempt to destroy Davis’s chances? She clearly took advantage of the situation, and Davis later interpreted it bitterly. Claims about systematic lobbying are harder to establish in every detail. The verified result is dramatic enough: Davis lost, Bancroft won and Crawford accepted the Oscar.
Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in a trailer image from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Image: Warner Bros.; Public domain.Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte and the Failed Reunion
After Baby Jane, Aldrich planned another Gothic drama pairing the two stars. Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte began with Davis as Charlotte Hollis and Crawford as her cousin Miriam. Production quickly became difficult. Crawford left after a period of illness, and Olivia de Havilland replaced her.
The AFI Catalog entry confirms that Crawford and Davis had signed to play new characters in a follow-up project. The reasons for Crawford’s departure have been narrated as a final act of feud, but health, contractual conflict, distrust and production pressure all mattered. Reducing the event to cowardice or sabotage repeats the very publicity logic that made the rivalry profitable.
The finished film belongs to Davis and de Havilland, not to the Davis-Crawford partnership. It also shows the limits of using personal hostility as a production strategy. Tension can energise a performance; it can also make sustained collaboration impossible.
What Is True, What Is Likely and What Is Legend
True: Davis and Crawford competed professionally, made hostile remarks, clashed during Baby Jane, and failed to complete a planned second film together.
True: Crawford accepted Anne Bancroft’s Oscar after Davis was nominated and Crawford was not.
Likely: Both women understood that publicity surrounding their rivalry could help a film and keep them culturally visible.
Needs caution: Exact dialogue in private confrontations, perfectly timed acts of physical sabotage and stories first published long after witnesses had died.
Misleading: The idea that their careers can be explained mainly through hatred of one another. Each had decades of work, artistic ambition, family complexity and institutional battles unrelated to the other.
Ageing Women and Hollywood’s Double Standard
The feud has survived partly because it dramatises a cultural double standard. Male stars could be competitive, controlling and difficult while remaining symbols of authority. When women demonstrated the same qualities, publicity often converted professional conflict into personal jealousy.
The BFI’s introduction to Davis notes that the off-screen rivalry intensified the battle of wills in Baby Jane. That is accurate, but the film also asks why audiences enjoy seeing formerly glamorous women degraded. Its success encouraged a cycle sometimes labelled “psycho-biddy” or “hagsploitation,” in which older female stars were offered visibility through horror.
Both Davis and Crawford accepted material that confronted ageing because conventional leading roles had narrowed. Their courage and their exploitation are part of the same history.
The Better Way to Remember Them
The feud is an entry point, not a verdict. Davis should be watched in Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, The Letter, Now, Voyager and All About Eve. Crawford should be watched in Our Dancing Daughters, Grand Hotel, The Women, Mildred Pierce and Johnny Guitar. Those films reveal different talents that no rivalry summary can contain.
Then watch What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? as a collaboration. Its force comes from two actors who knew exactly what the audience expected and used that expectation without surrendering completely to it.
Bette Davis and Joan Crawford: Frequently Asked Questions
Did Bette Davis and Joan Crawford really hate each other?
They genuinely disliked and distrusted one another, but the scale and detail of the feud were enlarged by publicity, later interviews and repeated anecdotes.
How many films did Davis and Crawford make together?
They completed one feature together, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? Crawford began Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte but left production.
Did Joan Crawford stop Bette Davis winning an Oscar?
Davis lost to Anne Bancroft. Crawford accepted Bancroft’s award and may have campaigned socially, but Oscar voting was conducted by Academy members; no single person controlled the result.
Who was more successful?
Both had exceptional careers. Davis received more acting nominations, while Crawford built major careers at MGM and Warner Bros. and won for Mildred Pierce. “More successful” depends on the measure used.
Is What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? worth watching?
Yes. Beyond the feud, it is a powerful Gothic study of performance, dependency, resentment and Hollywood’s treatment of ageing women.