Bette Davis at Home: See Inside the Golden Age Trailblazer’s Abodes From Coast to Coast

Bette Davis’s magnetism onscreen was irrefutable, and off-camera, she was a force to be reckoned with; the two-time Academy Award winner sued Warner Bros., her contracted studio, in 1936, claiming that she had been saddled with inferior roles. Though she lost the case, the Dark Victory star continued pushing against Hollywood’s expectations of its leading ladies, embracing complicated, unsympathetic, and decidedly unglamorous women onscreen and becoming a trailblazer as her career progressed. “I do not regret one professional enemy I have made,” Davis said in her first memoir, The Lonely Life. “I suppose I’m larger than life. That’s my problem. Created in a fury, I’m at home in a tempest.”

Given the (at least) 75 residences she called home throughout her lifetime, it certainly tracks that the big-screen legend was comfortable with a bit of chaos. “Playing house is a childhood game I’ve never put away,” the Marked Woman star, whose youth was spent “always moving,” once said. “My home has always meant so much to me.” Davis stepped away from her career for three years during her fourth (and final) marriage, devoting herself entirely to being a wife and a mother—and loving every minute of it, per her autobiography. “I wanted to be married. I wanted a home,” she writes. “Small wonder that when I could, I acquired houses as other women acquire jewels.”

Below, we take a look at a small fraction of the places the Golden Age luminary chose to nest.

Davis had a lifelong love of dogs and would go on to lead an animal welfare organization .

Photo: Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images

Early life in Massachusetts

Toddler Bette Davis and her sister Bobby stand next to a dog in this undated image. The family patriarch left the girls to be with his mistress when Davis was just seven. “My father’s cavalier disappearance from our home when I was a small child certainly has significance. Consider my quartette of marriages,” she writes in her memoir The Lonely Life. “My sister Bobby’s world went up in smoke. Mine shifted on its axis. It’s as simple as that.”