She accepted the award from her bed, claiming illness on the night of the ceremony. A photographer captured her receiving the Oscar from the film’s director, surrounded by the trappings of an invalid while clearly groomed and dressed for maximum photographic impact. The image became one of the more discussed photographs in the history of Oscar ceremonies—a performance of helplessness from a woman who was anything but helpless, managed with the same instinct for controlled presentation that had defined her career.
Davis received further nominations for *All About Eve* (1950)—still regarded by many critics as the finest performance of her career, as the aging Broadway actress Margo Channing who watches a young protégée usurp her life—and *The Star* (1952). But neither produced a third Oscar, and through the 1950s her commercial standing declined alongside her box office returns. The roles that sustained a major Warner Bros. contract began to disappear. She worked, but with diminishing institutional support.
Crawford’s trajectory through the 1950s was different in texture but similarly complicated. She appeared in a string of films for various studios—*Torch Song* (1953) at MGM, *Johnny Guitar* (1954), *Female on the Beach* (1955), *Autumn Leaves* (1956)—that demonstrated her range and her willingness to take unusual material. She married Alfred Steele, the president of Pepsi-Cola, in 1955, and became deeply involved with the company, traveling internationally as a Pepsi representative and, after Steele’s death in 1959, being elected to the company’s board of directors—the first woman to hold such a position.