Key Points
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Lisa Kudrow loves Bette Davis, and her filmography.
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The Friends star praised Davis as “one of the most interesting women.”
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Kudrow also commended the dialogue in classic Hollywood films.
Lisa Kudrow is a Bette Davis stan.
The Comeback star praised the iconic Hollywood actress during her “Closet Picks” segment with Criterion on Monday, calling the late Davis “one of the most interesting women.”
“Really strong, you know? And just sort of knew who she was and put that in all of her characters,” Kudrow, 62, said of Davis while discussing the film Now, Voyager (1942), which happened to be Kudrow’s mom’s favorite.
“It was really important to see, I thought,” the Friends star added of the classic flick about a neurotic heiress (Davis) who undergoes psychiatric treatment to escape her domineering mother (Gladys Cooper). Soon enough, she blossoms into a confident woman and finds life-altering love, and newfound purpose, on a cruise.
“I also thought, when I was young, ‘What happened to women?’ Isn’t that funny? They had barely any rights, right? I mean, not barely. They could vote. Just. And I thought, ‘Wow, they’re so much stronger,'” Kudrow insisted of storylines during the golden age of Hollywood. “That’s how it felt.”
Kudrow went on to reveal she got to visit the stage where the movie was shot on the Warner Bros. lot while she was shooting Friends in the 1990s. “I was so excited to tell my mom,” she said. “Yeah, that was thrilling.”
The soundstage was also featured in The Comeback season 3, while Kudrow’s character, Valerie Cherish, honors her late best friend, Mickey Deane (Robert Michael Morris.) The film was Mickey’s favorite, and Valerie quotes it throughout Episode 3, “Valerie Faces Reality.”
In Monday’s video, Kudrow also celebrated movies like The Philadelphia Story (1940), Defending Your Life (1991), another one of Davis’ films during her Criterion chat: All About Eve (1950).
“I saw this when I was, like, a pre-teen and was just blown away by the intelligent way they spoke. The dialogue is unbelievable,” she said of All About Eve, which starred Davis as a fading Broadway star and Anne Baxter as the rival up-and-coming actress.
American actress Bette Davis, circa 1945.
Credit: Silver Screen Collection/Getty
Kudrow joked of Davis’ role: “Bette Davis is a theater actress who feels like she’s aging out of ingenue roles. That’s not true in the theater because it’s so far away. You can be my age and playing 20, I think.”
Davis is known as one of the best actresses in Hollywood history. A native of Massachusetts, she won two Oscars for Best Actress (for 1935’s Dangerous and 1938’s Jezebel), and was the first person to earn 10 Academy Award acting nominations (and one write-in for Of Human Bondage).
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Fun fact: Steven Spielberg bought Davis’ Oscar statuettes at auction in 2001 and 2002, and subsequently donated them to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Davis was also the first woman to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. She was honored in March 1977, calling the award “the frosting on the cake of my career.”
Davis died of metastasized breast cancer in Oct. 1989 at the age of 81.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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