Her final film was *Trog* (1970), a British science-fiction production in which she played an anthropologist who befriends a primitive hominid. The film is widely considered one of the worst productions of her career, and she gave it the same professional commitment she had given everything else, which is both admirable and a little heartbreaking. She retired after *Trog* and spent the remaining years of her life managing her affairs and her image from her New York apartment.
Davis’s post-*Baby Jane* career was marked by greater range and, intermittently, greater recognition. *The Nanny* (1965) allowed her to play a sinister domestic in a British thriller that gave her something genuinely interesting to do within a genre frame. *The Anniversary* (1968) was a dark British comedy in which she played a monstrous matriarch with an eye-patch—a role that she played with the kind of relish that suggests she found the character’s specific form of evil congenial.
The quality of her film work varied significantly through the late 1960s and 1970s. She appeared in the disaster film *Airport 1975* (1974) and in the horror anthology *Burnt Offerings* (1976) alongside Karen Black and Oliver Reed. The critical consensus on these films is that they do not represent Davis at her best, but that Davis at less than her best was still more technically accomplished than most of what surrounded her.
Her television work in this period was often stronger than her film work. The Emmy she won for *Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter* (1979) came for a performance as a cold, recently widowed woman whose estranged daughter (Gena Rowlands) returns to care for her—a study in emotional withholding and late reconvening that played to Davis’s specific strengths. The role of the difficult, controlled, emotionally defended woman was territory she had been exploring for decades, and she brought to this television production the same intelligence she had brought to her best Warner Bros. work.