5 Feet of Fury

“The guilty pleasure of reading Hollywood memoirs”

See that’s your trouble right there, newspapers:

Why “guilty”?

How corny.

Why not “I read Hollywood memoirs and you should too or fuck off”?

Does everything, even a nicely written article like this one, have to be so cliched?

Your boring worldview is boring.

Anyhow:

Davis won a lead actress Oscar in 1936 for “Dangerous” and in 1939 for “Jezebel,” and while she was nominated eight additional times, those two titles alone give a fairly accurate sense of her screen persona. As an actress, she excelled at strong roles, although she wasn’t always given them at her home studio, Warner Bros., with which she had headline-grabbing contract disputes. In the book, she wisely brushes past the legal details, instead recounting falling in and out of favor, feeling slights and making demands.It’s fascinating to read her puzzling through and defending her choices — her work always came first — particularly because she had no Hollywood model to follow.