, “that I realised I may have wanted to become an actor so fervently because I could use acting to fill out the persona of someone confident in their abilities – someone I desperately wanted to be like in real life.”, Davis has spent her career seeking out ballsy roles, while battling a chronic tendency towards people-pleasing off screen.
Davis, now 66, announced her intention to be in the movies at the age of three, thus displaying a penchant for attention-seeking quite at odds with the prevailing mores of Wareham, Massachusetts, in the 1950s. Even her name comes from a desire to avoid being impolite. For years, Davis fondly thought her mother didn’t know the correct way of spelling “Gina”; she was well into her 20s before her mother explained: “I didn’t want anyone to think it was pronounced ‘gina’.
The representation of women and girls in the industry, on screen and behind the camera, is a drum she beats unapologetically throughout and the book is peppered with anecdotes that paint a depressingly familiar picture of the way female actors were treated. There’s the director who asked her to audition by sitting on his lap while he rubbed his face in her breasts or the time Bill Murray, during a meeting, insisted on trying out a massage machine on her, despite her repeated refusals.
Davis, top, with Susan Sarandon in 1991: ‘Susan has changed my life more than anyone I’ve ever known’.Until she met Susan Sarandon. “Susan has changed my life more than anyone I’ve ever known.” She has erred on the side of jaunty and conversational rather than soul-baring in the book and her combination of humour and self-deprecation is immediately appealing . Some readers may feel cheated that there is more detail here about her pets than her children, or that she is so reticent about the end of her three marriages, but she has clearly had to establish boundaries around her family’s privacy in the face of press intrusion.