Just the other day I was talking to a friend about Bette Davis. My friend is a guy who loves movies, but who had never seen any of her movies.<\/p>\n
I was trying to explain to him just how radical she was. You see, there were certain ironclad assumptions in old Hollywood.<\/p>\n
One of those assumptions was that a movie star must always lead with attractiveness. It’s ok to play a dark and problematic character (Bogie did that quite a lot, for example), but underneath it all, your audience is still supposed to secretly want to sleep with you.<\/p>\n
Davis blew all of that out of the water. Unlike her contemporaries, she leaned into embracing the realities of aging.<\/p>\n
As the years went on, she boldly transitioned from being a glamorous leading lady to becoming one of the greatest character actors of all time. In fact her greatest performances were in that latter part of her career.<\/p>\n
Just this morning I learned that today is her birthday. Please join me in wishing a very happy 118th birthday to one of the greatest legends of the silver screen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Just the other day I was talking to a friend about Bette Davis. My friend is a guy who loves movies, but who had never seen any of her movies. I was trying to explain to him just how radical she was. You see, there were certain ironclad assumptions in old Hollywood. One of those … Continue reading “Bette Davis”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28333"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28333"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28336,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28333\/revisions\/28336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}