In her autobiography A Lonely Life, Bette Davis remembers making All About Eve with none of the rancour or drama that should provide all the dirt an essayist would look for when writing about the film. Her part was supposed to go to someone else, but when Claudette Colbert injured her back while filming Three Came Home, director Joseph L. Mankiewicz had producer Darryl F. Zanuck call Davis. “I can think of no project that from the outset was as rewarding from the first day to the last,” she writes.
