All About Eve
1950 film by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

All About Eve is a 1950 American drama film written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and produced by Darryl F. Zanuck. It is based on the 1946 short story (and subsequent 1949 radio drama) "The Wisdom of Eve" by Mary Orr, although Orr does not receive a screen credit.
The film stars Bette Davis as Margo Channing, a highly regarded but aging Broadway star, and Anne Baxter as Eve Harrington, an ambitious young fan who maneuvers herself into Channing's life, ultimately threatening Channing's career and her personal relationships. The film co-stars George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Gary Merrill, and Hugh Marlowe, and features Thelma Ritter, Gregory Ratoff, Barbara Bates, Walter Hampden, and Marilyn Monroe in one of her earliest roles.
All About Eve held its world premiere in New York City on October 13, 1950. Highly praised by critics at the time of its release, it received a record 14 nominations at the 23rd Academy Awards, becoming the only film in Oscar history to receive four female acting nominations (Davis and Baxter as Best Actress, Holm and Ritter as Best Supporting Actress). It went on to win six awards, including Best Picture, as well as Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, Mankiewicz's second consecutive wins in both categories.
Widely considered as among the greatest films of all time, in 1990, All About Eve became one of 25 films selected that year for preservation in the United States Library of Congress's National Film Registry, deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The film was ranked No. 16 on AFI's 1998 list of the 100 best American films.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q200299. The first chronological checks are 1950, 1946, 1949 and 1990.
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This entry incorporates text from “All About Eve” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.