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The Final Resting Place of Bette Davis.

Bette Davis   5th.April 1908 - 6th.October 1989.
Located in the Court of Remembrance, first large statue on the left.
Cause of Death - Breast Cancer.

Bette Davis  was a two-time Academy Award-winning American actress of film, television and theatre. Ruth Elizabeth Davis, known from early childhood as "Betty", was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to Harlow Morrell Davis and Ruth Augusta Favor; the family was of English, French, and Welsh ancestry. In 1915, Davis's parents separated and, in 1921, Ruth Davis moved to New York City with her daughters, where she worked as a photographer. Betty was inspired to become an actress after seeing Rudolph Valentino in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and Mary Pickford in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921), and changed the spelling of her name to "Bette" after Honoré de Balzac's La Cousine Bette.  She received encouragement from her mother, who had aspired to become an actress. She attended Cushing Academy, a finishing school in Ashburnham, Massachusetts where she met her future husband, Harmon "Ham" Nelson. In 1926, she saw a production of Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck with Blanche Yurka and Peg Entwistle. Davis later recalled that it inspired her full commitment to her chosen career, and said, "Before that performance I wanted to be an actress. When it ended, I had to be an actress... exactly like Peg Entwistle".  She auditioned for admission to Eva LeGallienne's Manhattan Civic Repertory, but was rejected by LeGallienne who described her as insincere. She was accepted by the John Murray Anderson School of Theatre, where she also studied dance with Martha Graham. She auditioned for George Cukor's stock theatre company, and although he was not impressed, he gave Davis her first paid acting assignment – a one week stint playing the part of a chorus girl in the play, Broadway. She was later chosen to play Hedwig, the character she had seen Peg Entwistle play, in The Wild Duck. After performing in Philadelphia, Washington and Boston, she made her Broadway debut in 1929 in Broken Dishes, and followed it with Solid South. She was seen by a Universal Studios talent scout, who invited her to Hollywood for a screen test. Davis moved to Hollywood where she appeared in several films for Universal Studios, before she signed a contract with Warner Brothers. In a 1937 legal case, Davis attempted to free herself from the restraints of her contract but failed. Over the following decade she established herself as one of the most notable and praised film actresses of her day. Highly regarded for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical biographies and occasional comedies, her greatest successes were in romantic dramas.
Known for her forceful and often intense dramatic style, Davis was recognized for her willingness to play unsympathetic characters. She gained a reputation as a perfectionist who could be highly combative, and her confrontations with studio executives, film directors and costars were often reported. Her career declined during the 1950s, although she continued to appear in films and television. During the 1960s she played in several horror films, and over the course of the next two decades, also appeared in numerous television movies.
Davis was the co-founder of the Hollywood Canteen, and was the first female president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She maintained a high profile within the Hollywood community, earning ten Academy Award nominations and becoming the first woman to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. Davis's forthright manner, her clipped vocal style and ubiquitous cigarette contributed to a public persona which has often been imitated and satirised. She admitted that her dedication to her career had often been at the expense of her personal relationships; married four times, she was once widowed and thrice divorced, and raised her children as a single parent. Her final years were marred by a long period of ill health. She continued acting until shortly before her death from cancer, with more than one hundred film and television roles to her credit.
Illness, betrayal and death
In 1983, she was acting in the television series Hotel when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. Within two weeks of her surgery she suffered four strokes which caused paralysis in the right side of her face and in her left arm, and left her with slurred speech. She commenced a lengthy period of physical therapy and, aided by her personal assistant, Kathryn Sermak, gained partial recovery from the paralysis. During this time, her relationship with her daughter, B.D. Hyman deteriorated, when Hyman became a born again Christian and attempted to persuade Davis to follow suit. With her health stable, she traveled to England in 1984 to film the Agatha Christie mystery, Murder With Mirrors. Upon her return, she learned that Hyman had published a memoir, titled My Mother's Keeper in which she chronicled a difficult mother and daughter relationship and depicted scenes of Davis's overbearing and drunken behavior. Several of Davis's friends commented that Hyman's depictions of events were not accurate; one commented "so much of the book is out of context". Mike Wallace rebroadcast a Sixty Minutes interview he had filmed with Hyman a few years earlier in which she commended Davis on her skills as a mother, and said that she had adopted many of Davis's principles in raising her own children. Critics of Hyman noted that Davis had supported the Hyman family for several years and had recently saved them from losing their house. Despite the acrimony of their divorce years earlier, Gary Merrill also defended Davis. Interviewed by CNN, Merrill said that Hyman was motivated by "cruelty and greed". Davis's adopted son, Michael Merrill, ended contact with Hyman and refused to speak to her again, as did Davis, who also disinherited her.
In her memoir, This 'N That (1987), Davis wrote, "I am still recovering from the fact that a child of mine would write about me behind my back, to say nothing about the kind of book it is. I will never recover as completely from B.D.'s book as I have from the stroke. Both were shattering experiences." Her memoir concluded with a letter to her daughter, in which she addressed her several times as "Hyman", and described her actions as "a glaring lack of loyalty and thanks for the very privileged life I feel you have been given". She concluded with a reference to the title of Hyman's book, "If it refers to money, if my memory serves me right, I've been your keeper all these many years. I am continuing to do so, as my name has made your book about me a success." 
Davis appeared in the television film, As Summers Die (1986) and Lindsay Anderson's elegiac The Whales of August (1987), in which she played the blind sister of Lillian Gish. The film earned good reviews, with one critic commenting, "Bette crawls across the screen like a testy old hornet on a windowpane, snarling, staggering, twitching – a symphony of misfired synapses". Her last performance was in the title role in Larry Cohen's film Wicked Stepmother (1989). By this time, however, her illness had worsened, and after disagreements with Cohen she walked off the film set. An edited version of the film was released posthumously. With no further film offers, Davis appeared on various talk shows and was interviewed by Johnny Carson, Joan Rivers, Larry King and David Letterman, discussing her career but refusing to discuss her daughter. Her appearances were popular; Lindsay Anderson observed that the public enjoyed seeing her behaving "so bitchy. I always disliked that because she was encouraged to behave badly. And I'd always hear her described by that awful word, feisty." 
During 1988 and 1989, Davis was feted for her career achievements, receiving the Kennedy Center Honor, the Legion of Honor from France, the Campione d'Italia from Italy and the Film Society of Lincoln Center Lifetime Achievement Award. She collapsed during the American Cinema Awards in 1989 and later discovered that her cancer had returned. She recovered sufficiently to travel to Spain where she was honored at the Donostia-San Sebastián International Film Festival, but during her visit her health rapidly deteriorated. Too weak to make the long journey back to the U.S., she traveled to France where she died on October 6, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine. She was interred in Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California, alongside her mother, Ruthie, and sister, Bobby. On her tombstone is written: "She did it the hard way", an epitaph that had been suggested to her by Joseph L. Mankiewicz shortly after they had filmed All About Eve.
In 1997, the executors of her estate, Michael Merrill, her son, and Kathryn Sermak, her former assistant, established "The Bette Davis Foundation" which awards college scholarships to promising actors and actresses.