Queen bitch

In 1950, Bette Davis had a string of recent flops behind her. She was 41, married to an embarrassing twerp (her third husband), and her career was spiralling above the plughole. She only got the lead part in All About Eve when Claudette Colbert — who was all signed up — ruptured a disc while doing a rape scene on another film. The story goes that with Colbert shrieking in traction, the producer Darryl Zanuck, who hadn’t spoken to Davis since using the words ‘You’ll never work in this town again’, was obliged to offer her the part. It didn’t take much. No sane actress could resist Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s fabulous script with its sophisticated wit and refreshing cynicism. Davis literally kissed the script and leapt at the part of the Broadway diva Margo Channing. It did her libido a power of good. She had a thing about men with hairy backs and immediately had an affair with her on-screen partner, the hirsute Gary Merrill, who later said he spent three days walking around the set trying to hide a permanent erection.

The 1950 film is soon to open as a West End play. The stage version is being directed by the Belgian theatre maestro Ivo van Hove, who has done other films for the stage — notably last year’s version of Network (1976) with Bryan Cranston and Visconti’s Osessione (1943) with Jude Law. Van Hove’s cannibalising method is to use loads of digital technology — lots of live camera stuff — to make a hybrid theatre (or ‘thea-tuh’ as Bette Davis says it) out of deconstruction and reassembly. The statuesque Gillian Anderson is bravely taking on the Bette Davis part, Downton’s Lily James is Eve.

The film’s story is one of usurpation. It was based on a short story, first printed in Cosmopolitan magazine, by Mary Orr that was in turn inspired by events that actually happened to the German actress Elisabeth Bergner.