After Now, Voyager, Bette Davis received letters from fans of both genders who felt their possessive mothers had ruined their lives, much as Mrs. Vale nearly ruins Charlotte's life. She also got letters from mothers admitting they had been as bad as her mother in the film.

Warner Bros. reunited the stars (Davis, Paul Henreid and Claude Rains) and the director of Now, Voyager for Deception (1946), a melodrama set in the world of classical music. Although it lacked the impact of their first film together, it performed well at the box office.

For the rest of his career, Henreid's female fans would ask him to light their cigarettes as he had for Davis. When he directed her in Dead Ringer (1964), they re-staged the cigarette scene for publicity cameras. Years later, he used a photo of himself lighting two cigarettes at once on the cover of his memoirs, Ladies Man.

When she toured with clips from her movies in the '70s, Davis always had fans offering to light her cigarettes in imitation of Henreid during the question and answer sessions following the screening.

Now, Voyager is one of the films the characters watch at the local movie theatre in Summer of '42 (1971). Director Alan J. Pakula noted that the clip was often greeted with applause.

Take-offs on the cigarette-lighting scene turn up in Young Frankenstein (1974) and Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997). In addition, two of the schoolboys in The History Boys (2006) act out the film's final scene for their classmates.

Charlotte Vale's youthful romantic tryst in a limousine on a ship's freight deck was echoed by the love scene between Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic (1997).

On a 2004 episode of the British soap opera East Enders, one of the characters borrows Davis' closing line, "Don't ask for the moon. We have the stars."

by Frank Miller