Anne Baxter (1923-1985) would be 100 years old at this writing.
Only with restraint have we stayed our impulse to do a dedicated post on her prior to this benchmark: for as we wrote here, here, and here, Baxter’s turn as Naughty Nefretiri in The Ten Commandments (1956) revved our engines even in childhood. Indeed, were I Moses and confronted with such a temptation, you can rest assured that the Israelites would never have been given any Commandments — it would have been Golden Calves straight down the line! Baxter shone especially in parts that permitted to her to indulge her smoldering sultriness. Young Ellen Barkin, with her wide set eyes, reminded me something of Baxter; as did young Kate Mulgrew, with that sturdy frame, thick hair, and husky voice. Nowadays, Florence Pugh reminds me a little of her. Ye Gods, Florence Pugh would be great in Baxter’s other iconic role, the title character in All About Eve (1950)! But Baxter will always own it. Eve Harrington is the sociopathic role model for all show biz aspirants — deny it if you will! Those whom Eve destroys are painted more sympathetically, but in the end the differences are those of degree, not of kind. Careers are omelettes, and eggs must be broken. Thus Sayeth the Lord. Baxter played the whole amazing arc, from the apparent wide-eyed innocent to the chilling cut-throat, with terrific skill.
One wonders how much of the autobiographical there is in Baxter’s performance as Eve. She’d actually rode shotgun to a big star when she was still a kid; she played Katharine Hepburn’s sister in the stage version of The Philadelphia Story when it opened out of town. Hepburn had her replaced before it hit Broadway. Did she smell trouble? At any rate, Baxter was a child of privilege who seemingly decided at quite a young age that a career as an actress was a bauble that she’d quite like to have, and so she did what it took to get one. Her father was an executive at Seagram’s; her maternal grandfather was architect Frank Lloyd Wright. She attended Brearley, and studied acting with Maria Ouspenskaya, and was only 13 when she made her Broadway debut in Seen But Not Heard (1936). This was followed by There’s Always a Breeze (1938) and Madame Capet (1938).
Baxter was only 17 when she made her screen debut in Twenty Mule Team (1940) with Wallace Beery. Westerns make up a surprisingly large component of her output, given her association with melodramas. She’s also in Smoky (1946), Yellow Sky (1948), A Ticket to Tomahawk (1948), The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1952), The Spoilers (1955), Three Violent People (1957) and Cimarron (1960). (Coincidentally, she shares a birthday with western stars Gary Cooper and Gabby Hayes). At the beginning of her career, with WWII raging, Baxter was cast almost exclusively in war films, including The Pied Piper (1942), Crash Dive (1943), Five Graves to Cairo (1943), The North Star (1943), The Fighting Sullivans (1944), The Eve of St. Mark (1944), and Sunday Dinner for a Soldier (1944) with John Hodiak, whom she was to marry in 1946.
It wasn’t the most charmed career in Hollywood history, and Baxter’s not always memorable in them, but a good number of the films she appeared in are sort of “almost classics”. Her pictures include The Great Profile (1940) with John Barrymore, Charley’s Aunt (1940) with Jack Benny, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), Lubitsch’s A Royal Scandal (1945), the 1946 version of The Razor’s Edge (for which she won an Oscar for her role as the fallen woman Sophie), Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953), Fritz Lang’s noir classic The Blue Gardenia (1953), the West German co-production Carnival Story (1954, of special interest to circus lovers), and Walk on the Wild Side (1962).
As with many actors of her generation, Baxter began to be eclipsed as the sixties progressed, and so we see her reduced to taking such things as William Castle’s The Busy Body (1967), and playing Batman villains. She guest starred on TV shows like Columbo, Ironside, Marcus Welby MD, and The Love Boat. Starting in 1983, she had one last hurrah as the star of the Aaron Spelling night time soap Hotel. Amusingly, the show was originally to star Bette Davis, her nemesis in All About Eve, but Davis fell ill, so Baxter stepped in. Did she slip her a Mickey?
Davis had the last laugh, for (though 15 years older) she was to outlive Baxter by many years. Baxter was only 62 when she died suddenly of a stroke in late 1985. She collapsed on a New York City street while hailing a cab. There are worse ways to go than not knowing what the hell hit you. It seems to me she was a lucky gal, from cradle to grave.
(Travalanche) 
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