All About Eve on AFI's 1998 list of the 100 best American films. Margo Channing (Bette Davis) is one of the biggest stars on Broadway. But having just turned forty she is worried about what her advancing age will mean for her career. After a performance of Margo's latest play, "Aged in Wood," Margo's close friend Karen Richards (Celeste Holm), wife of the play's author Lloyd Richards (Hugh Marlowe), brings in a besotted fan, Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), to meet Margo. Eve tells the group gathered in Margo's dressing room—Karen, Lloyd, Margo's boyfriend Bill Sampson (Gary Merrill), a director who is eight years
Bette Davis well-known, particularly "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night". She was again nominated for an Academy Award, and critics such as Gene Ringgold described her Margo as her "all-time best performance". Pauline Kael wrote that much of Mankiewicz' vision of "the theater" was "nonsense", but commended Davis, writing "[the film is] saved by one performance that is the real thing: Bette Davis is at her most instinctive and assured. Her actress - vain, scared, a woman who goes too far in her reactions and emotions - makes the whole thing come alive." Davis won a Best Actress