studio. In addition, these newcomers can negotiate a
new salary for each film, and they routinely make
more money from a single picture than some of the
greatest stars of classical Hollywood made in their
entire careers. Furthermore, they usually work
under their own names. But because audience
reaction, and not a studio’s publicity office, main-
tains their status, such actors often face highly
unpredictable futures.
Let’s look more closely at the careers and earn-
ings of two of the most important and popular
movie stars in history: Bette Davis, who was at the
top during the studio era, and Nicole Kidman, who
is at the top today. Although they are both well
regarded for their professional approach to per-
formances in a range of film genres—including
melodrama, comedy, historical and period films,
and romantic dramas—there are significant differ-
ences in their careers that result from the different
production systems in which each worked (see
Chapter 11, “Filmmaking Technologies and Produc-
tion Systems”).
Bette Davis (1908–1989), who began her movie
career on Broadway, went to Hollywood at the age
of twenty-two and, over a career that spanned fifty-
two years, appeared in eighty-nine movies, fifty-
nine of them under contract to Warner Bros. Her
breakthrough role was in John Cromwell’s Of
Human Bondage(1934); she won her first Oscar as
Best Actress in a Leading Role in 1936 and again in
1939, when she reached the peak of her career in
William Wyler’s Jezebel(1938). She sued Warner
Bros. in an attempt to get better roles in better pic-
tures (she was forced, by contract, to make a lot of
mediocre films) but lost her case. (In essence, Davis
had to fight for what actors of Kidman’s generation306 CHAPTER 7ACTING
21Stardom: then and now Bette Davis, an actor who
became a legend for playing strong-willed and often neurotic
female characters, was in top form as Leslie Crosbie in The
Letter(1940). In the movie’s electric opening scene, she
pumps five bullets into her lover [1], then pleads self-defense
in court. It represents another successful collaboration
between Davis and director William Wyler, with whom she
also worked on Jezebel(1938) and The Little Foxes(1941).
Nicole Kidman, a legend in her own time, is famous, like
Davis, for her professionalism and versatility. Unlike Davis,
however, she has had almost total control of her career and
thus has been far more adventurous in the roles she chooses
to play, resulting in a filmography of considerable depth and
range. She is well known for her willingness to take risks in
highly individual movies, such as Robert Benton’s The Human
Stain(2003), Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding
(2007), and Steven Shainberg’s Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of
Diane Arbus(2006), a fictional account of the famous
photographer’s life. At a turning point in her career—she
was 43, an age when most actresses have trouble securing
good roles—Kidman costarred with Aaron Eckhart in John
Cameron Mitchell’s Rabbit Hole (2010), an important drama
about an upper-middle-class suburban couple trying to deal
with the death of their two-year-old son in a car accident.
The movie avoids the tragedy itself in order to focus on the
couple’s very different attempts to put their marriage back
together. In image [2], Kidman’s distinctive “blank face”
allows the audience to “write” whatever it wants on her
conflicting day-to-day responses to her personal grief and to
a marriage going somewhat recklessly to pieces. She wants
to move on; her husband wants to keep everything that
reminds him of the boy. With performances as moving as this
one—for which she received an Oscar nomination as Best
Actress—Kidman‘s career shows no sign of slowing down.