Film series showcases the very best of Bette

Fasten your seat belts: It’s going to be a Bette night!

Thursday at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is throwing a Centennial Tribute party for late actress Bette Davis. Film historian Robert Osborne, the host of Turner Classic Movies, is master of ceremonies for the evening, which will feature clips from her films and discussions with actors Joan Leslie, Gena Rowlands and James Woods.

On Friday evening, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art kicks off a monthlong Davis series with the 1938 Southern belle melodrama “Jezebel,” for which the actress won her second Oscar, and the 1939 weepie “The Old Maid.” Osborne will host the unveiling of a new Davis postage stamp.

Other films in the LACMA program include “All About Eve” (1950), “The Letter” (1940) and “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962).

“I think she’s relevant today because of the work that she did,” Osborne says of Davis, who died in 1989.

The actress’ work, he said, is “timeless. She always told me that her films would last more than some of the other actresses’ because the costume designers at Warner Bros. didn’t have the money or desire to do costumes for their leading ladies like they did at MGM. She said, ‘I think one of the things about my films that weren’t the costume dramas was the fact that I don’t look strange in the clothes. They are kind of timeless for any age.’ ”

Davis also seemed more interested in the quality of her films than her own role.

“I remember one time I had a 16-millimeter print and I showed her ‘The Letter’ in my apartment in L.A.,” Osborne says. “I thought, of course, she’ll talk about herself and watch what she was doing; she’s an actress.”

Davis “talked through the whole movie,” he said, but never about herself. “She was really watching the overall film.

“That tells you something about her because she wanted the product to be good, and if the film was good, she would come off better than her being spectacular in a bad film.”

-- Susan King