The Academy celebrated the centennial of legendary Oscar-winning actress Bette Davis with a gala evening hosted by Robert Osborne. The event featured numerous film clips and personal remembrances from her son, Michael Merrill, co-stars Gena Rowlands and Joan Leslie, and longtime friend Kathryn Sermak.

A highlight of the evening was the surprise appearance of Bette’s four-time co-star and friend of six decades, Olivia de Havilland. Following a film clip from Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), Osborne told the audience “Olivia, as many of you know, lives in Paris. I do wish she could be here tonight…and she is.” De Havilland emerged from behind a backstage curtain to an immediate standing ovation from the awestruck crowd. Earlier in the evening a scene from one of their previous collaborations, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939) had been played.

The evening had begun with an excerpt from Davis’ signature role as Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950), in which she delivers the famous line “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” The program that followed, guided knowledgably by Davis’ close friend Osborne, showcased the actresses’ tremendous range as a performer. A total of 18 film clips were screened over the course of the program.

“She was everything you wanted Bette Davis to be,” said Gena Rowlands. “There’s nothing Bette Davis could do to make me not love her…she opened my mind so much in acting because when I was young all of the actresses were expected to be sweet and good and then there was Bette. And I thought ‘my word, she’s not afraid of anything – ‘ the most independent actress I’d ever seen…She seemed to dive into the soul of whomever she was playing.” Rowlands played Davis’ daughter in the television film “Strangers: The Story of a Mother and Daughter” (1979), for which Davis won an Emmy®.

Joan Leslie spoke after a clip from Hollywood Canteen (1944), in which she appeared with Davis and John Garfield. Davis was instrumental in the founding of the real Hollywood Canteen, a nightclub for servicemen destined for overseas missions during World War II. Leslie recounted how Davis cajoled the studios into paying for the Canteen, and recruited stars from all the studios to staff the nightclub every week.

Davis’ son Michael Merrill, a Boston lawyer with a court date the next day, flew in that morning for the tribute to his mother and had to take the red-eye back that night. He told the capacity crowd at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater, “My mother…was a perfectionist, she was tremendously loyal, she was dedicated, she was hard working, she was so proud of her New England heritage. You know, she didn’t have it easy growing up. She worked hard. Her mother worked hard…I think she instilled that kind of work ethic here in our family…She was a great and wonderful, loving and caring mother.”

De Havilland recounted her earliest memories of seeing Davis on screen while still a high school student; “She had so much dynamism, she had so much character, she was so original that I thought, Oh, there is ‘somebody.’ She’s rare.” Two years later she found herself at Warner Bros. and cast in a Davis picture. It took several more years and three films together before their frosty beginnings were overcome by a genuine affection, which arose during their work on In This Our Life (1942) and lasted for the rest of Davis’ life.

De Havilland said: “I admired and liked the fact that she was larger than life…that she gave everything she had to anything she undertook whether it was a role or a cause she believed in, or just roasting the Thanksgiving turkey. I admired her honesty, her directness, her courage, her loyalty and her desire to be fair…At the risk of sounding what Bette would scorn to be, which is sentimental, I should say that even though not everyone recognized this, and she certainly did not reveal it to all, I think that Bette Davis had a heart of gold. 24-carat.”