Bette Davis – OF HUMAN BONDAGE: Biggest Oscar Snubs #1

Bette Davis in John Cromwell's Of Human Bondage

Steven Spielberg – THE COLOR PURPLE: Biggest Oscar Snubs #2

Steven Spielberg, Barbra Streisand, Leonardo DiCaprio, Audrey Hepburn, Gordon Willis, Christopher Nolan The Director, and James Cameron The Screenwriter have all faced major Oscar "snubs," but those have been nothing compared to what took place in early 1935. Even if James Cameron The Director had been snubbed for the blockbuster Avatar a few weeks ago, that would still not be ranked as the #1 Oscar Snub ever.

Why not? Well, simply because Academy rules wouldn't have been drastically altered to allow last-minute write-in ballots to select the year's Oscar winners just to appease Avatar fans. But that's exactly what happened back in February 1935 following the furor sparked by the omission of Bette Davis from the 1934 roster of Best Actress Academy Award nominees.

Davis was a shoo-in for a nomination following her take-no-prisoners, star-making turn as a vicious Cockney waitress named Mildred Rogers, who makes life miserable for clubfooted medical student Leslie Howard in John Cromwell's film adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. If that weren't all, Davis' character comes down with tuberculosis, but still fails to find redemption. As the film progresses, the glamorous star of Fashions of 1934 and Ex-Lady gets uglier and uglier: her hair becomes increasingly disheveled, she develops dark circles under eyes, her pasty face looks about ready to sink into itself.

Critics were impressed. Life magazine, for one, asserted that Davis had given "probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress," while the Time reviewer wrote that "Bette Davis, in the first part she has ever had which has required more than handsome clothes and an enigmatic expression, makes Mildred almost as unpleasant to see as she was to imagine." And following effusive praise for Leslie Howard, the New York Times' Mordaunt Hall remarked on Davis' "enormously effective portrayal."

In her 1962 autobiography The Lonely Life, the actress set modesty aside to call herself "the female Marlon Brando of my generation" for her fearless portrayal of the unrepentant wench.

Considering the sort of acclaim she received in 1934, how could Davis not have been nominated?

Fewer Best Actress slots — only three that year — and a mix of studio and Academy politics is the probable answer.

Bette Davis was a Warner Bros. contract star. Jack Warner didn't want her to play Of Human Bondage's Mildred at rival studio RKO. Compounding matters, the film lost money (about $45k then, or $750k today). RKO wouldn't push Davis, a non-contractee in a movie that did poorly at the box office, while Warners wouldn't push Davis for a film made elsewhere that they felt the actress shouldn't have starred in to begin with.

Worse yet, the seven-year-old Academy was then at odds with the various burgeoning Guilds. Actors had been resigning en masse from the big-studio dominated Academy ranks in order to join the Screen Actors Guild. Only 95 of them were left to vote for the 1934 nominations.

The votes — at that time, the preferential system hadn't been established, yet — went to first-timer Claudette Colbert, a Paramount contract player who became a top star following the unexpected success of the Columbia-made comedy It Happened One Night; Metropolitan star Grace Moore, another Academy Award first-timer in another unexpected hit, the Columbia musical One Night of Love; and MGM's First Lady of the Screen and three-time nominee Norma Shearer (and wife of the studio's former second-in-command Irving G. Thalberg) for the period melodrama The Barretts of Wimpole Street.

The outrage over Davis' omission was such, however, that the Academy had to reconsider.

"The Academy is dwindling in importance, especially in Hollywood," commented the Hollywood Citizen-News, "and its current nominations have done much to harm it. Everyone in the profession is expressing amazement that Bette Davis is not even mentioned."

Demands for write-in votes began pouring in. Even nominee Norma Shearer expressed her support for giving Davis a chance. (The Thin Man's Myrna Loy also had her champions.) Nine days after the announcement of the nominations, Academy President Howard Eastabrook issued the following statement:

Criticisms of the nominations for the 1934 Academy Awards have appeared with such uniform content that they raise the question as to whether these criticisms are based on genuine opinion or propaganda. With so many achievements of unquestioned merit each year, however, it is inevitable that certain differences of opinion should arise.

Despite the fact that the criticism fails to take into consideration that the nominations have been made by the unrestricted votes of each branch, the awards committee has decided upon a change in the rules to permit unrestricted selection of any voter, who may write on the ballot his or her personal choice for the winners.