1941 – Bette Davis
The Little Foxes
Bette Davis, number six. This was her sixth nomination for Best Actress. She was clearly good at doing the deep drama, and she seemed to have a natural knack for playing a viperous villainess. In The Little Foxes, she is a greedy and mean woman, willing to screw over her own family in order to become filthy rich, and she does it all without committing any actual crimes, other than blackmail. She accomplishes her avaricious goals through manipulation and a generally sour disposition. And while she did not actively murder her husband, she calculatingly watched him die without lifting a finger to save him. Is that murder? Maybe it is.
Bette Davis had been around the block a few times by 1941, but she was clearly still the hot ticket. She was the queen of the silver screen bitches. Well, maybe that isn’t entirely true. After all, she played a virtuous and innocent victim in at least two other Oscar nominated films: Dark Victory and All This and Heaven Too, though she wasn’t nominate for her performance in that second one. But if you look at all her other Best Actress nominations, she played a mean and spiteful woman. Look at her films like Dangerous, Jezebel, or The Letter. She seemed to be perfect for those kinds of parts, and both audiences and critics loved her for it.
Here she played Regina Giddons, one of three siblings who are willing to scheme, manipulate, steal, and in her case, even murder, kind-of, to become super wealthy. She sacrifices the life of her unloved husband and her relationship with her beloved daughter to get what she wants. In other words, she played a horrible woman. The scene where she watcher her husband have his heart-attack was particularly good. The look of calculated inactivity on her face, the frozen, manic anticipation in her eyes was perfectly done.
I might sound critical of her performance, but I actually really liked Davis in this movie. She seemed to be perfectly cast, and I bet it was a difficult decision to award the Oscar to Joan Fontaine in Suspicion. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she had won. Sure, she was being typecast in the bad-girl roles, but darn if she wasn’t so good at it.