take for granted: the right to pick the roles they
want to play.) However, Davis did get better roles
(and rejected some juicy ones she shouldn’t have,
including Mildred Pierce [1945] and The African
Queen[1951]) and was so well paid in the 1940s that
she was known around Hollywood as the fourth
Warner brother. The years between 1939 and 1945
were marked by major successes—Edmund Gould-
ing’s Dark Victory(1939), Michael Curtiz’s The Pri-
vate Lives of Elizabeth and Essex(1939), William
Wyler’s The Letter(1940) and The Little Foxes(1941),
Irving Rapper’s Now, Voyager(1942) and The Corn Is
Green(1945)—but by 1950, her studio career was
over. As one of the first freelancers in the independ-
ent system, she revived her career with her great-
est performance (Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All about
Eve, 1950). However, she was then 41, the “barrier”
year that usually relegates women actors to char-
acter parts, of which she had her share, including
Robert Aldrich’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
(1962). Her career went downhill, although there
were still a few good movies and loyal fans; her
penultimate role was a very moving performance
in Lindsay Anderson’s The Whales of August(1987),
and—a demanding perfectionist to the end—she
walked off the set of her final film just before she
died. Bette Davis, a name synonymous with Holly-
wood stardom, ranked second (after Katharine
Hepburn) on the American Film Institute’s poll of
the greatest female actors.
While Bette Davis is an icon of movies past,
Nicole Kidman is a screen legend for today, an
actress who—unconstrained by a studio contract—
is free to choose her roles. She has worked with a
variety of directors, including Gus Van Sant, Jane
Campion, Stanley Kubrick, Baz Luhrmann, and
Stephen Daldry. Where Davis had some say over
her directors (all of whom were studio employees),
Kidman has worked with outsiders, insiders, kings
of the megaplexes, and avant-garde experimenters.
Kidman (b. 1967) began her movie career in Aus-
tralia at the age of fifteen and has since made
thirty-eight films (as of 2009), all independently
produced. Her breakthrough movie was Tony
Scott’s Days of Thunder (1990), after which her
career took off in such films as Gus Van Sant’s To
Die For and Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever
(1995), Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady(1996),
Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Baz
Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001), and Stephen
Daldry’s The Hours(2002), for which she won the
Oscar as Best Actress in a Leading Role for her
portrayal of Virginia Woolf. Another turning point
came in 2003, when she made three different movies
with three very different directors: Lars von Trier’s
Dogville, Robert Benton’s The Human Stain, and
Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain. Kidman is will-
ing to tackle serious melodrama (Sydney Pollack’s
The Interpreter, 2005), light comedy (Nora Ephron’s
Bewitched, 2005), edgy, experimental concepts
(Steven Shainberg’s Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of
Diane Arbus, 2006), comic drama (Noah Baum-
bach’s Margot at the Wedding, 2007), and fantasy
films (Chris Weitz’s The Golden Compass, 2007).
When Bette Davis turned forty-one, her career
(despite her success that year with All about Eve)
began its downward spiral. Ironically, Kidman, now
forty-four, remains at the peak of her career,
although there is no way to predict whether she
will continue to get roles worthy of her experience
and talent.
Let’s consider their earning power. In her career,
we estimate that Bette Davis earned approxi-
mately $6 million, which, in today’s money, is about
$10 million.^22 Until 1949, her salary was set by con-
tract; her highest studio earnings were $208,000
for the years 1941–43. Her highest poststudio earn-
ings came with her last movie, for which she was
paid $250,000. Kidman made $100,000 on her first
movie and today receives $17.5 million per picture.
During the first twenty-five years of her ongoing
movie career, Kidman has earned $230 million.
That’s twenty-three times what Davis earned over
an entire fifty-two-year career! Davis worked under
a Warner Bros. contract, and the studio kept the
lion’s share of profits from her films. Kidman is free
to negotiate the terms of her salary and her share
of the profits for her movies, terms that are deter-
mined by a far more complicated equation than a(^22) The figures cited here are based, in part, on information
provided by newspaper and magazine articles and by the
online database pro.imdb.com and do not include fees for
television acting, advertising work, DVD sales, etc.
THE EVOLUTION OF SCREEN ACTING 307