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When the flamboyant Tallulah Bankhead originated the role on Broadway, in 1939, Brooks Atkinson wrote, in the Times, “Sometimes our Tallulah walks buoyantly through a part without much feeling for the whole design. But as the malevolent lady of ‘The Little Foxes,’ she plays with superb command . . . constantly aware of the poisonous spirit within.” When Bette Davis agreed to play Regina in William Wyler’s deep and eerie 1941 screen adaptation, she insisted that she had nothing to add to what Bankhead had done with the part. But her director did. Wyler made Davis look like a construction. He buttoned her up in close-fitting shirts and high collars, then hemmed her in with closeups in which she had a Kabuki pallor, her spoiled rosebud of a mouth puckering out of her white face. It was these constrictions that allowed Davis to explode so forcefully, and with such calculated contempt, especially in Regina’s final, chilling conversation with her ailing husband:

REGINA: I was lonely when I was young. Yes, lonely, but not in the way people usually mean. I was lonely for all the things I wasn’t going to get. Everybody was so busy at home, so little place for what I wanted. Then Papa died and gave Ben and Oscar all the money.

HORACE: So you married me?

REGINA: Yes, I thought you’d get the world for me. You were a small-town clerk then. You haven’t changed.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010 ... ns-world-2

Bette Davis with her father Harlow Morrell Davis

“IN THIS OUR LIFE”, 1942