"all-about-eve"

Over the decades, our biggest stars and their agents have been forced to navigate yet another fascinating and frustrating aspect of the movie business: which parts to choose.

She was born Ruth Elizabeth Davis in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1908, and was, by her own admission, a Yankee.

With this year’s Oscars just days away, in the media and around the water cooler we engage in the recurring debate about which films deserve to win, and which, in fact, will.

Like the old saying goes, art imitates life. Before the women’s movement changed the landscape forever in the mid-late sixties, most Hollywood films limited women to playing “traditional” roles of housewife and mother.

The most famous quotes have become worn down with repetition: “Here’s looking at you, kid” from “Casablanca” (1942); “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” from “Gone With the Wind” (1939) and “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night” from “All About Eve” (1950). Happily, there are plenty more delightful zingers to be found in dialogue from our best movies.

Movies with similar titles often show up next to each other on the shelf, or line up in a search, but are usually very different animals—animals you don’t want to get mixed up.