Ancient Hollywood legend has it that lightning struck an ill-fated tree in front of the Davis house the moment Bette arrived upon this earth, and no novelist or poet could hope for a more fitting opening to a long and storied life for one of cinema's true icons. She would go on to electrify audiences for decades, giving us everything from the conniving gangster molls of her early Warner Brothers days to the mischievious nannies of her later Disney films. This is an actor who fearlessly took on Hollywood's stodgy rules for women by demanding more complicated roles and equal treatment for herself. A fighter to the end, Davis refused to fade into the background as a forgotten former star as so many of her peers were regulated to do, and indeed produced some of her best-loved work when she was well into her later years. As the first actor in history to receive no less than 10 Oscar nominations, Davis brought her unstoppable presence and a penchant for portraying complicated female characters with humanity and sympathy to a number of roles, including a mentally-unstable spinster (NOW, VOYAGER), a fiery, fierce southern bell (JEZEBEL), & even helping us to sympathize with a homicidal twin sister (DEAD RINGER). The ever-sardonic Davis brought a beautifully messy humanity and ferocious conviction to every part she played while blowing open the floodgates for herself, her contemporaries, & women in Hollywood forever, shedding the notion that female characters in films were to be well-behaved and submissive - words that no one would ever use to describe the clash of electricity and furor that was Bette Davis.

The Music Box Theatre is proud to present THE INDESTRUCTIBLE BETTE DAVIS; a 10-film celebration spanning Davis' astonishingly varied career of unforgettable performances, indomitable spirit, demand for respect, & bottomless passion for her work and equal treatment in Hollywood.

“Just watching Bette Davis on the screen was empowering to women. It was like, this is what’s possible, this is the range and depth that is possible for a woman. Enough already with these one-dimensional women. She expanded our range of possibilities.” - Jane Fonda "I think that Bette Davis would probably be burned as a witch if she had lived two or three hundred years ago. She gives the curious feeling of being charged with power which can find no ordinary outlet.” - E. Arnot Robertson