Bette Davis in THE LETTER

"No one gets in my way! Well, except me. I get in my own way."

Bette Davis Interview with James Grissom, 1984

“William Wyler was one of our greatest directors, but I still fought with him, even as I trusted him. I understood the relationship that existed between my characters and Bette Davis better than he did, and I was determined to marry those two women, and he sometimes got in my way. No one gets in my way! Well, except me. I get in my own way. There is a scene in the The Letter that I dream of cutting to this day. It’s after Leslie [the character Davis portrayed] is acquitted of the murder of her lover, and she is unhappily reunited with her husband, whom she disdains. I excuse myself from some celebratory event and sit silently in my room, doing some sewing. Wyler wanted my loneliness and my sadness—my barren soul—to be transmitted by my stillness, a sort of inertia. My sadness was over the death of the man I truly loved—and had killed. I was a cold and heartless woman; terribly manipulative. Leslie truly should have merely frozen over completely; she should have been barren. And I fought for a breakdown. I believed that Leslie needed to crack in solitude before she broke and confessed to her husband. I really believed this, and Wyler gave me the scene, and it’s my worst scene in that film. It doesn’t correspond with all the other scenes in which I play Leslie’s emotional coldness, emotional duplicity. It’s a bad scene. Well, I fought for it. I was wrong.”