This was not a woman who bent easily.
Her critical breakthrough had come earlier, with *Of Human Bondage* (1934), in which she played Mildred Rogers, a manipulative and ultimately degraded waitress whose treatment of the besotted Philip Carey (Leslie Howard) was then and remains one of the more unflinching portrayals of cruelty in classical Hollywood cinema. *Life* magazine called it “probably the best performance ever recorded on the screen by a U.S. actress.”
She was not nominated for an Academy Award for *Of Human Bondage*. The omission was striking enough that Norma Shearer—herself a formidable political force within the Academy—reportedly backed a write-in campaign, and the Academy that year explicitly allowed write-in votes in recognition of the public displeasure with the oversight. Davis received write-in votes but still did not win.
What she did win, the following year, was the Oscar for *Dangerous* (1935)—a film she herself described as inferior to *Of Human Bondage*, and the Oscar for which she privately considered a consolation prize from a guilty Academy. The view was characteristically ungracious and characteristically honest.
Her second Oscar came for *Jezebel* in 1938—the same year the “box office poison” advertisement appeared, which would have been a bitter irony for Crawford but not for Davis, who was not named in it. *Jezebel* was directed by William Wyler, with whom Davis had a turbulent personal and professional history, and the film—a pre-Civil War melodrama about a willful Southern woman whose defiance leads to tragedy—gave her the period backdrop and the emotional range she excelled at. She would receive five consecutive Best Actress nominations from 1938 to 1942.