What Davis had that Crawford did not have, by the mid-1940s, was a specific kind of critical credibility—a recognition that she had brought something of lasting value to American cinema that went beyond commercial success. *All About Eve* (1950) crystallized this. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film about the Broadway world, in which Davis played Margo Channing—the established star whose life is infiltrated and gradually supplanted by a calculating young admirer—gave her a character whose intelligence and self-awareness were not incidental to the drama but constitutive of it. The performance is extraordinary by any standard: the verbal precision, the physical command, the way Davis made Margo’s theatrical vanity and her genuine insight coexist without contradiction.
She received the nomination. She did not win. (Judy Holliday won for *Born Yesterday*—an outcome that at least some critics and historians have found puzzling in retrospect.) The Cannes Film Festival gave her its Best Actress prize instead. The film itself received fourteen nominations and won six awards. It has never lost its standing as one of the definitive films about performance and ambition and the fear of obsolescence.
Davis and Crawford, from roughly 1950 onward, were both experiencing versions of the same professional problem from slightly different starting positions. Davis had more critical prestige and somewhat less commercial bankability. Crawford had somewhat more commercial bankability—or at least more active commercial management, given her Pepsi commitments—and somewhat less critical prestige. Both were over fifty. Both were finding that the industry’s appetite for stories centered on women their age was limited in ways that the films of the previous decade had not prepared them for.