She retired from film in 1970. She appeared on television through the early 1970s—guest appearances, a short-lived soap opera stint when her daughter Christina fell ill, a role on *Night Gallery*. Her last dramatic performance was in a *Sixth Sense* episode in 1972. Her last public appearance was in September 1974.
She died of a heart attack in New York City on May 10, 1977. She was in her early to mid-seventies, the exact year of her birth remaining contested.
Davis continued working with more sustained range. *Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte* was followed by *The Nanny* (1965), a tense British thriller in which she played a sinister governess, and *The Anniversary* (1968), in which she wore an eye-patch and devoured every scene she was in. Through the 1970s, she appeared in increasingly diverse formats—the Airport franchise’s disaster picture *Airport 1975* (1974), the Agatha Christie adaptation *Death on the Nile* (1978). In 1977, she became the first woman to receive the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award.
Her television work produced significant recognition. She won an Emmy for *Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter* (1979). She received nominations for *White Mama* (1980) and *Little Gloria… Happy at Last* (1982).
In 1987, she appeared in Lindsay Anderson’s *The Whales of August* alongside Lillian Gish—a pairing of two survivors from different eras of American cinema—and gave what many consider her final significant screen performance, a study in controlled ferocity applied to a woman in her final years.