From Margo Channing to Margaret Elliot: The Aging Actress, Age Performance, and the Dictates of Aging in Joseph Mankiewicz’s All about Eve and Stuart Heisler’s The Star

Abstract

Bette Davis played the role of an aging actress in different films throughout her career. In Joseph Mankiewicz’s All about Eve (1950), Davis performs one of her most highly acclaimed parts as Margo Channing, a mature actress who must face the decline of her acting career upon the arrival of a younger and ambitious counterpart. Only two years later, in Stuart Heisler’s The Star (1952), Davis once more played the role of an aging actress, Margaret Elliot, who refuses to accept that her career as an actress has come to an end, thus taking a bleaker approach in comparison with Mankiewicz’s film. Bearing in mind the intertextuality existing between both films, since All about Eve and The Star address the figure of the aging actress and are both considered self-referential films insofar as they are films about the film industry, this article will analyse how these two films address the performance of aging on and off screen, as actresses switch roles between acting younger or older in relation to characters that function as mirrors of aging, and how they eventually come to terms with the dictates of aging and their own aging process as women.