It's all about 'Eve' and Celeste Holm in Huntington
A publicity still from the 1950 Academy Award-winning drama "All about Eve" features (left to right): Gary Merrill, Bette Davis, George Sanders, Anne Baxter, Hugh Marlowe and Celeste Holm. Credit: KRT/HANDOUT
Someone should have warned Celeste Holm to fasten her seat belt the day shooting began on "All About Eve." Holm greeted the film's star, Bette Davis, with "Good morning." Davis' response: "Oh --, good manners."
Years later, Davis attempted to apologize for her behavior, but Holm, said, "I was still very offended by what she said."
Expect Holm, who played Davis' best friend, Karen Richards, to share more stories about the legendary diva and the making of the 1950 best picture when film historian Foster Hirsch talks to her Thursday night at 7:30 at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington. Then stay for a 60th anniversary screening of "All About Eve."
Holm, 93, lives in Manhattan and has been married for six years to opera singer Frank Basile. She recently shared memories of "Eve" and her other films.
HELLO, NORMA JEAN One "Eve" co-star who took an immediate liking to Holm was Marilyn Monroe, who played aspiring actress Claudia Casswell, "a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art."
"She was sort of fluffy and darling" and seemed "afraid of her own shadow," said Holm, who guided the newcomer and shared many lunches with her at the studio commissary. The two women remained friends until Monroe's death in 1962.
Another cast member Holm bonded with was Gary Merrill, whom she met on a plane to Hollywood prior to starting "Eve." Merrill, who played Davis' lover in the film and became her fourth husband in real life, asked Holm during the flight, "So, what do you think it's going to be like working with the queen bee?" Holm soon found out.
A SERIOUS ACTRESS "Eve," for which Holm earned her third supporting actress Oscar nomination (she won for Elia Kazan's 1947 anti-Semitism drama "Gentleman's Agreement"), was a high point to her film career. Fresh from Broadway (she was the original Ado Annie in "Oklahoma!"), Holm was signed by 20th Century-Fox in 1946, where she became typecast as "a fun-loving, whimsical type" in musicals. She fought the studio for serious parts and even got creative to secure a role (she trapped "The Snake Pit's" director Anatole Litvak in an elevator to convince him to cast her as a mental patient).
For "Eve," tricks weren't necessary. Holm's deft voice-over role as Addie Ross, "the other woman" in "Eve" writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's "A Letter to Three Wives" (1949), was enough to convince him she could play Karen. And when Holm read the "Eve" script, she couldn't wait to do the film. "The script was wonderful," she said. "To work with that director who wrote that script, you knew it would be something special."
WHAT "All About Eve" 60th anniversary screening and interview with Celeste Holm
WHEN | WHERE 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Cinema Arts Centre, 423 Park Ave., Huntington, $20, 800-838-3006, cinemaartscentre.org
