AWARDS AND HONORS

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was nominated for five Academy Awards including Best Costume Design (Black and White), Best Cinematography (Black and White), Best Sound, Best Supporting Actor (Victor Buono) and Best Actress (Bette Davis). It won in one category: Best Costume Design.

Both Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were nominated as "Best Foreign Actress" at the BAFTA Film Awards.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was nominated for the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1963.

Robert Aldrich was nominated for a Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures.

Bette Davis and Victor Buono received Golden Globe nominations in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor categories.

In 2003 the American Film Institute ranked the character of Jane Hudson number forty-four on its list of the greatest villains in movie history, "100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains."

The American Film Institute ranked Baby Jane number sixty-three on its list of the Top 100 Heart-Pounding American Movies.

THE CRITIC'S CORNER - WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?

"Joan Crawford and Bette Davis make a couple of formidable freaks in the new Robert Aldrich melodrama, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. But we're afraid this unique conjunction of the two one-time top-ranking stars in a story about two aging sisters who were once theatrical celebrities themselves does not afford either opportunity to do more than wear grotesque costumes, make up to look like witches and chew the scenery to shreds." -- The New York Times

"Teaming Bette Davis and Joan Crawford now seems like a veritable prerequisite to putting Henry Farrell's slight tale of terror on the screen. Although the results heavily favor Davis (and she earns the credit), it should be recognized that the plot, of necessity, allows her to run unfettered through all the stages of on coming insanity...Crawford gives a quiet, remarkably fine interpretation of the crippled Blanche, held in emotionally by the nature and temperament of the role. Physically confined to a wheelchair and bed through the picture, she has to act from the inside and has her best scenes (because she wisely underplays with Davis) with a maid and those she plays alone." -- Variety

"A little bird told me that What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? was a chiller on the order of Psycho [1960], and therefore not to be missed. So much for the critical acuity of little birds. The picture is far from being a Hitchcock--it goes on and on, in a light much dimmer than necessary, and the climax, when it belatedly arrives, is a bungled, languid mingling of pursuers and pursued which put me in mind of Last Year at Marienbad [1961]. Still, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford do get a chance to carry on like mad things, which at least one of them is supposed to be." -- The New Yorker

"In playing their rather implausible roles the two old-pro actresses have a field day under the direction of Robert Aldrich...[Miss Davis] acts throughout...with all her well-remembered bite and venom intact, while Miss Crawford plays it beautifully and nobly, as of yore." -- The Motion Picture Herald

"A superb showcase for the time-ripened talents of two of Hollywood's most accomplished actresses, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Scenes that in lesser hands would verge on the ludicrous simply crackle with tension." -- The Saturday Review "The screen hasn't had such acting and face-making since D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein dominated the directorial field. This film is a field day for Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and director Robert Aldrich, who saw in Henry Farrell's novel of the same title the outlines of a modern Greek tragedy. Yet it is great fun, too, because this is pure cinema drama set in a real house of horrors." -- The Chicago Daily News

"Far-fetched, thoroughly engaging black comedy...Bette has a field day in her macabre characterization, with Buono a perfect match." -- Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide

Compiled by Andrea Passafiume