All About Acting Over Forty

If you have not seen All About Eve, I implore you, drop everything you’re doing and go rent it now! It is one of my personal favorites and perhaps one of Bette Davis’s best performances, though you’re free to debate me on that. It remains the Most Nominated Film by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It won six Oscars for Best Supporting Actor, Best Costume Design, Best Director, Best Picture, Best Sound, and Best Screenplay. There isn’t much that can you can say about the greatness of this film that has not already been said. So why talk about it, you might ask?


Since Women’s Lib in the Seventies, there has been much talk about female empowerment, breaking the glass ceiling, and how women sabotage other women. Also, everyone knows about how a Hollywood actress’s roles are cut in half once she turns 40 since most films want young, beautiful women as their leading ladies. After 40, women seem resigned to the roles of either mom, grandma, or cougar. All About Eve is a movie that deals with all of these themes and ideas that still plague actresses and career women in modern days, with the added twist that All About Eve was made in 1950. Being very young, when I think of the Fifties, I think of the Leave It To Beaver and Donna Reed Show reruns I’ve seen. Or something reminiscent of Al’s Diner in Happy Days. The Fifties is not an era one typically associates with ideas of women taking charge of their lives, careers, and especially their men. The film seems completely ahead of its time to me. It amazes me how the lessons learned from still apply today and how the struggles in the movie are still prevalent in today’s Hollywood.

The entire film is a satire of struggling women in theatre. Bette Davis’s brusque, been-around-the-block-before character of Margo Channing is an aging starlet in a world where roles go to young women. Celeste Holm is Karen Richards, Margo’s friend and wife of a playwright who wrote a play especially for Margo in younger days. Anne Baxter plays up-and-comer Eve Harrington who maniacally weasels her way into Margo’s good graces and then steals away her career. Even Marilyn Monroe makes a cameo in a role that soon comes to echo her own rise to stardom, an ingénue who has to use her body to get things done and has the caricature of a dumb blonde. The characters still apply today in modern Hollywood and many actresses face the same struggles as Margo Channing although perhaps not with as much wit.

If you want to further explore what it means to be an actress over forty, I recommend checking out Invisible Women, which tries to find out what is responsible for the phenomena of aging actress disappearing off the screen.