Baby Jane Hudson characters, "Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte", also starring Davis as a mentally unstable recluse lost in her delusions. Jane and Blanche's story is parodied in an apocryphal comic strip in "" by Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill. In this film, director Robert Aldrich mined the careers of his two stars, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford (who played Blanche), by using their early (circa 1930s) film clips when the story called for examples of their characters' work. The other characters react to clips of Bette Davis's early roles with dismay at her "bad acting", and when clips of Joan Crawford's old movies
Say Hello to Yesterday them.' Jean Simmons returned to London after a five-year absence to star in the film and shared the star billing with Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo, Leonard Whiting. The original title was to have been "Whatever Happened to Happy Endings?" but Cinerama didn't want to use this title, partly because Jean Simmons had just starred in, and been Academy award nominated for, the similarly titled "The Happy Ending", and partly because Cinerama feared that because "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" was a film of the era and there was a series of 'Whatever Happened...' films, they might be sued by other companies.