Why is Davis so fidgety?


Is it just me or is Bette Davis unusually fidgety in this film? Did I miss a plot element or something? Davis is perhaps my favorite actress of all time so I'm used to her mannerisms but she seemed to moved a bit much in this film and it seemed a bit unusual to me.

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[deleted]

Nothing is mentioned; I believe it is simply Davis' interpretation of Elizabeth's many quirks.

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My guess, and it is only a guess, is that Davis was looking for something to underscore Elizabeth's advanced age. I believe the film is set in 1595 making the queen 62 years old.

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I know! It's a very good movie but her fidgety left arm & fingers drive me nuts. It's extremely distracting. I found myself watching her arm rather than anything else. I actually wondered if Bette had Parkinson's Disease or something but from comments I see, must be that's part of her interpretation of Elizabeth. It's a little too distracting, though (it's like seeing a bit of food stuck in someone's mouth!).

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Bette Davis is my all-time favorite actress and i love her. I read in her interview about this film and Errol Flynn. Maybe she was so fidgety for Errol Flynn's acting; She had been very enthusiastic about the challenge of playing Elizabeth (in 1955 she played her as an old woman in The Virgin Queen ). She had lobbied for Laurence Olivier to play the part of Essex, but Warner Brothers, nervous at giving the part to an actor who was relatively unknown in the United States, instead cast Errol Flynn, who was at the height of his success. Davis felt he was not equal to the task, and also believed from past experience that his casual attitude to his work would be reflected in his performance.

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She did tons of research for the role and actually the Queen herself was a fidgeter,and this tendency worsened with age. I have read at least 10 books on Elizabeth and she really caught the Queen as much as any actress could based on Elizabeth's quirks as documented by her contempories and major historians. Glenda Jackson and Cate Blanchett also are good Elizabeths,but Bette is the best in my opinion. The real Queen was very eccentric, and this film actually downplayed how quick she was to imprision someone in the tower. Essex was one of those people she had GOOD reasons to send to the tower; some of her courtly lovers were imprisioned for YEARS for marrying other women like Sir Walter Raleigh, and for other reasons based on whimsy and vanity,not matters of state. The film is correct though that she had a firm hand on how to rule successfully and no man came between her and her throne for long.

What is interesting to me is how committed to the role Davis was--like she wass living Elizabeth's life for real! She had that larger than life acting quality needed for the role. It is a fine display of acting and the scene in which she has the tantrum is first rate and very much like the Queen's rages at whichever courtier she was mad at in the histories! Another interesting thing about Bette's flamboyant portrayal is how well Errol Flynn's more subtle natural playing is a counterpoint to the Davis histrionics....it is the much the same choice that the great Richard Burton made opposite Elizabeth Taylor's bombast in Who's afraid of Virgina Woolf...underplay,tone it down,make it easy and natural,in order to make the other player's rages etc more vivid. I don't think Olivier would have made that same acting choice and would have actively competed againist Bette mannerism and gesture for mannerism and gesture and the film would have been over the top with two such portrayals,IMO! I think she had the right Essex after all. She even admitted right before her death that Flynn was great in it to Olivia De Haviland.

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You are right. It was part of her Delsarte training as an actress. To convey age, and inner feelings of her characters.

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Boy, do I have to disagree with these reviewers. Bette screwed up big time! No one twitches around like that at 63, unless they are ill. Bette is not fidgetting, she is twitching so badly I can hardly hear her lines...unless I turn the TV so loud that my neighbors will have to wake-up and listen with me. As someone who happens to be 63 right now, and who can remember my mom at 68, very funny and calm, I have to say Bette may have researched Elizabeth, but forgot to research being her sixties. Typical for someone 31 to exaggerate what it will be like to grow old, she is twitching around that set as tho she's 99 and on crack. In your sixties, all that back and forth jerking would begin to hurt a lot. She'd be on something 16th century if she had done that to her neck, spine, and shoulders all day...belladonna or some weird wine...or something brought from someplace exotic...maybe some pot...I love the idea of Bette walking around with a pipe playing Elizabeth. Seriously, though, it's too bad she didn't go to Santa Monica or Arizona and watch some people in the sixties she could emulate. No one would ever be able to retire to play golf if they were so out-of-control at 63.

Errol Flynn is a disappointment (the only one of the old-time actors I don't like--I adore everyone from Robert Montgomery to Clark Gable to Cary Grant to Humphrey Bogart to the Barrymores to Tyrone Power to Franchot Tone to Gary Cooper to Fredric March, et al. The animosity between Flynn and Bette is apparent. No way this guy loves the queen enough to risk a relationship with such a black widow spider, who could lock him up indefinitely or behead him if she grew tired of his lack of seriousness or dedication. When I read about their dislike for one another, the film made sense. Before that, I could not believe Elizabeth even liked this man and kept waiting for her to behead him from the start. I wonder if a better actor might not have steadied Davis down...a Barrymore perhaps?

I much preferred Cate Blanchett in this role--maybe I'm just spoiled. But I do remember Glenda Jackson as well, and though she was more intense, her portrayal seemed much more accurate as well. Bette makes me feel like this movie is a product of the 1950s, when women were portrayed as silly breeders who were mere children waiting for a man to make them a woman and keep them in line or terrible things would happen...like they'd grow up to twitch all the time....

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Are YOU on crack?

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Yes, I noticed that and I loved it, actually. I think it was her way or portraying a nervous habit, I know many people who fidget with rings when nervous or bored. And if you were as busy and pre-occupied as Elizabeth was, I would say that fidgeting would be excuseable. Haha!

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I rather like Davis's hand gestures in this film
I think she it shows the nervous tension Elizabeth must feel running a country and her sense of paranoia, I wonder if she was playing her as some sort of bird say an eagle the use of the claws and her eating through the film suggest this to me. The whole film is stylised and uses very theatrical devices so her performance for me fits perfectly, if she had underplayed it more then it would feel off balance.

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Miss Davis' hand gestures in this film have always been an object of amusement for myself and my fellow movie buffs. Her hand gestures and fidgeting are more pronounced in this film than in any other. Upon reviewing some of her other films, we found that her hand gestures were more pronounced in her other "period" or "costume" pieces than her "comtemporary" pieces. We figured it was because she couldn't smoke on screen, so she had to do something.

As a smoker myself, whenever I am in a situation where I can't light up, I like to amuse my friends with some carefree Bette Davis as Elizabeth the First hand gestures, until I am allowed to light up! My cohorts will then call me an "indecent hedge-drab"...LOL..remember that line?

I may as well have property of M.G.M. tattooed on my backside!

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In a number of other Davis films you can see her fidgeting, mostly with her hands. Usually she does it when she is trying to convey a certain emotion, or situation, sometimes though it appears that she does it absent mindedly. In this role, however I would have to agree with many of you that it is merely her interpretation of the character.

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[deleted]

Watching her fidget here, you can understand Wyler's frustration and threats to put a chain around her neck. Other than clips, I haven't seen this film in many years but plan to revisit it soon, but not too soon, perhaps - I've just watched Helen Mirren's ELIZABETH I and finally watched Cate Blanchett's ELIZABETH only a few months ago. However, despite the performances of all of these actresses and others, the definitive Elizabeth for me is Glenda Jackson in ELIZABETH R.

9/18 Edit: I just watched the film tonight - talk about "Glorious Technicolor"! Indeed, Davis seems to do a great deal of fidgeting and unnecessary flexing of those bejeweled hands, and to top it off, at one point she comments that "This court wriggles like a mess of eels". Apparently no one informed Davis that she was setting the example!!!

"I don't use a pen: I write with a goose quill dipped in venom!"---W. Lydecker

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[I think she had the right Essex after all. She even admitted right before her death that Flynn was great in it to Olivia De Haviland.]


Maybe it was the admission that she actually made a mistake that gave her the stroke and killed her.


Tiberius: Fate chose me to govern swine, in my old age, I have become a swineherd.

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[deleted]

If you had to admit all the mistakes a retard like you makes in a lifetime you would have strokes for eternity!

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<As a smoker myself, whenever I am in a situation where I can't light up, I like to amuse my friends with some carefree Bette Davis as Elizabeth the First hand gestures, until I am allowed to light up!>

I hadn't thought of it before, but you mention smoking & I think this is the only Davis movie I've seen where she doesn't smoke. Would've been a bit odd to see in the time frame it's set in anyway.

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She should have taken a quick puff on Walter Raleigh's pipe.

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I thought the fidgeting perfectly in character. If it was because Betty couldn't smoke, she need not have abstained. If I remember correctly, Elizabeth the First did smoke. She had been hooked on the weed by Raleigh, who brought it back from the New World. She smoked in long clay pipes like others of her day.

Smoking is very bad for you, my dears, I must say. Very hypocritcally as one who lit up a million or so Lucky nonfilters during my 40-some years of smoking. When I was young practically everyone, male and female, smoked. Most of those who did not kept ashtrays in their homes for their friends who did. I quit l2 years ago after seeing a X-ray of my lungs. Nearly every Betty Davis movie I see makes me want a cigarette, especially And Now Voyager, in which she and Paul Henreid seem to have worn out the machinery in a couple of cigarette factories.

He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good... St. Matthew 5:45

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Thank you. I thought the same thing as I read these reviewers talking about her great acting--it hit me that she always had a cigarette when the cameras weren't rolling! Of course, it made her crazy to be wearing a wig, over a shaved patch of skin no less, stinging and itching as she perspires wearing those heavy dresses--they noted she lost 2-3 lbs a day filming this. That discomfort must have made her want a cigarette even more. Today, she'd probably get a patch to wear while filming! And the twitch-lovers would have to find another oddity to prove great acting chops.

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