Britannica On This Day October 6 2023

This Day in History: October 6

Featured Event

1960







The American adventure film Spartacus, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, had its world premiere; it won several Academy Awards, including best supporting actor for Peter Ustinov.


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Featured Biography

Bette Davis
American actress







Bette Davis, original name Ruth Elizabeth Davis, (born April 5, 1908, Lowell, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 6, 1989, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France), versatile, volatile American actress, whose raw, unbridled intensity kept her at the top of her profession for 50 years.
Davis developed a taste for acting while attending her mother’s alma mater, Cushing Academy in Massachusetts. After gaining a smattering of experience in summer stock, she was accepted by John Murray Anderson’s acting school, where she quickly became a star pupil. In 1929 she made her first Broadway appearances, in The Earth Between and Broken Dishes, which led to a movie contract with Universal Pictures. Upon her arrival in Hollywood, however, the studio executives determined that she had no “sex appeal,” and, after a series of thankless roles in such films as Bad Sister (1931) and a handful of equally unrewarding loan-outs to other studios, Universal dropped her option. The dispirited young actress was on the verge of looking for another line of work when actor Murray Kinnell, with whom she had appeared in The Menace (1932), recommended her to play the ingenue in Warner Brothers’ The Man Who Played God (1932). The positive critical response to her work in this film prompted Warner Brothers to sign Davis to a contract.


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