Joan Crawford was an American actress. She started her career as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies before debuting on Broadway. Crawford was signed to a motion picture contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1925. Initially frustrated by the size and quality of her parts, Crawford launched a publicity campaign and built an image as a nationally known flapper by the end of the 1920s. By the 1930s, Crawford's fame rivaled MGM colleagues Norma Shearer and Greta Garbo. Crawford often played hardworking young women who find romance and financial success. These "rags-to-riches" stories were well received by Depression-era audiences and were popular with women. Crawford became one of Hollywood's most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, but her films began losing money. By the end of the 1930s, she was labeled "box office poison".
Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis was an American actress with a career spanning more than 50 years and 100 acting credits. She was noted for playing unsympathetic, sardonic characters, and was famous for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical films, suspense horror, and occasional comedies, although her greater successes were in romantic dramas. A recipient of two Academy Awards, she was the first thespian to accrue ten nominations.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is an American psychological horror novel by Henry Farrell published in 1960 by Rinehart & Company. The novel has earned a cult following, and has been adapted for the screen twice, in 1962 and 1991.
Agnes Robertson Moorehead was an American actress. In a career spanning five decades, her credits included work in radio, stage, film, and television. Moorehead was the recipient of such accolades as a Primetime Emmy Award and two Golden Globe Awards, in addition to nominations for four Academy Awards.
Robert Burgess Aldrich was an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. An iconoclastic and maverick auteur working in many genres during the Golden Age of Hollywood, he directed mainly films noir, war movies, westerns and dark melodramas with Gothic overtones. His most notable credits include Vera Cruz (1954), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), The Big Knife (1955), Autumn Leaves (1956), Attack (1956), What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The Longest Yard (1974).
Autumn Leaves is a 1956 American psychological drama film directed by Robert Aldrich and starring Joan Crawford in an older woman/younger man tale of mental illness. The film was distributed by Columbia Pictures. The screenplay was written by Jean Rouverol and Hugo Butler, though it was credited to Jack Jevne, since Rouverol and Butler were blacklisted at the time of the film's release.
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is a 1962 American psychological horror thriller film directed and produced by Robert Aldrich, from a screenplay by Lukas Heller, based on the 1960 novel of the same name by Henry Farrell. The film stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, and features the major film debut of Victor Buono. It follows an aging former child star tormenting her paraplegic sister, a former film star, in an old Hollywood mansion.
Henry Farrell was an American novelist and screenwriter, best known as the author of the renowned gothic horror story What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, which was made into a film starring Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
Baby Jane Hudson is a fictional character and the main antagonist of Henry Farrell's 1960 novel What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? She was portrayed by Bette Davis in the 1962 film adaptation and by Lynn Redgrave in the 1991 television remake. The 1962 production is the better-known, and Bette Davis received an Academy Award nomination for her performance. The character is portrayed by Susan Sarandon, who plays Bette Davis, in the TV anthology Feud: Bette and Joan.
The 35th Academy Awards, honoring the best in film for 1962, were held on April 8, 1963, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in Santa Monica, California, hosted by Frank Sinatra.
This is a complete filmography of Bette Davis. Davis began acting in films in 1931, initially as a contract player with Universal Studios, where she made her film debut in Bad Sister. She was initially seen as unappealing by studio executives, and was assigned to a string of B-movies early in her career.
The Old Maid is a 1939 American drama film directed by Edmund Goulding. The screenplay by Casey Robinson is based on the 1935 Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Zoë Akins, which was adapted from the 1924 Edith Wharton novella The Old Maid: the Fifties.
Ernest Jacob HallerASC, sometimes known as Ernie J. Haller, was an American cinematographer.
Lukas Heller was a German-born screenwriter.
Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte may refer to:
"Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte" is a popular song with music by Frank De Vol and lyrics by Mack David, introduced in the 1964 film Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte starring Bette Davis. The song's title appears with varying punctuation in its different versions: this article indicates how each specific version styled the title.
Michael Luciano was an American film and television editor with about forty feature film credits and many additional credits for television programs. From 1954 to 1977, Luciano edited 20 of the films directed, and often produced, by Robert Aldrich. Aldrich was a prolific and independent maker of popular films "who depicted corruption and evil unflinchingly, and pushed limits on violence throughout his career." Their early collaboration, the film noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955), was entered into the US National Film Registry in 1999; the unusual editing of the film has been noted by several critics. Luciano's work with Aldrich was recognized by four Academy Award nominations, for Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The Longest Yard (1974).
Feud is an American docudrama television series created by Ryan Murphy, Jaffe Cohen, and Michael Zam, which premiered on FX on March 5, 2017. Conceived as an anthology series, Feud's first season, Bette and Joan, chronicles the well-documented rivalry between Hollywood actresses Joan Crawford and Bette Davis during and after the production of their psychological horror thriller film What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Jessica Lange and Susan Sarandon star as Crawford and Davis, respectively. Judy Davis, Jackie Hoffman, Alfred Molina, Stanley Tucci, and Alison Wright feature in supporting roles. Academy Award–winning actresses Catherine Zeta-Jones and Kathy Bates also appear.
The Killing of Sister George is a 1968 American film directed by Robert Aldrich and filmed at his Aldrich Studios in Los Angeles. It is based on the 1964 play by British playwright Frank Marcus. In the film, an ageing lesbian television actress, June "George" Buckridge, simultaneously faces the loss of her popular television role and the breakdown of her long-term relationship with a younger woman. Although Marcus's play was a black comedy, the film version was marketed as a "shocking drama"; it added explicit lesbian content that was not in the original play, and was presented as a serious treatment of lesbianism.
