The other day, with little fanfare, the 100th birthday of one of the greatest movie stars of them all came and went. And that's a shame. For Bette Davis deserves attention even today, nearly 20 years after her death -- she remains one of the most important figures in screen history.

I remember it was in 1978 when, on a Friday afternoon, my press contact at Paramount called and wondered if he'd like the chance to do a one hour radio interview with Ms. Davis in her hotel room at the plaza. "Would I?" I asked incredulously. "Of course. When? Two weeks from now?"

"On Monday," came the reply. "We didn't know she'd be available." I quickly agreed, even though that weekend, of all weekends, I'd been scheduled to attend a family wedding in Massachusetts. Remember, this was years before the Internet.

So I dutifully rounded all of the books in my movie library which pertained to her and her era in Hollywood -- some forty, as I recall -- packed them into the car, and as soon as we arrived at the home where we were staying, I notified the bride and groom of the situation.

Soon after the ceremony, I found myself in the basement of the home, while the reception was being held outside. Soon the bridesmaids drifted in along with the ushers, and began helping me find this reference or that movie's mention in one of the books. Several hours later, I’d somehow amassed several pages of single spaced notes and questions.

I remember being put at ease in her presence. She'd known my father, Broadway columnist Leonard Lyons, only slightly, since most of her career was spent on the west coast on studio lots, sound stages and trailers. But she was amazing. She knew the demands of a radio interview and gave me short, to-the-point answers; all informative, many frank, and all fascinating. When I mentioned her screen debut in 1931 she said: "Bad sister....Bogie was in it" and began reminiscing about events decades before, as if they'd happened the previous week.

Bette Davis was not conventionally beautiful by any means. But the camera loved her nonetheless. Rivaled in her day only by Joan Crawford, she was one of the first contract players -- Warner Brothers was her studio -- who would refuse to take a role she thought badly written or demeaning or unworthy of a star of her stature. She was suspended by studio boss Jack Warner and faced threats to her career. But she persevered. The result is an astonishing legacy.

When she didn't get the role of Scarlett O'Hara in rival studio MGM's "Gone With The Wind" (in those days stars were occasionally "loaned out" to other studios) she took the title role of "Jezebel" the year before "GWTW", in an antebellum story and won one of her best actress Oscars. She starred in several of what were called "Warner Brothers Weepers," a series on tense melodramas which today look tame, but which often touched on emotions hardly explored back then. The best of the lot for my money is "Now, Voyager" with Paul Henreid and that famous climactic scene in which he puts two cigarettes in his mouth and lights them simultaneously--is there anything more Forties?

"The Little Foxes" and "Watch On The Rhine" are other hits of that year followed soon by "All About Eve" with a young actress named Marilyn Monroe and Anne Baxter, and later, director frank Capra's swan song (as they used to say) I.E. his screen farewell, "Pocketfull Of Miracles." That was a Damon Runyon story about "Apple Annie" what we'd call a homeless person today, whose apples seemed to bring good luck to a gangster with a heart of gold, played by Glenn ford. Anne Margaret, in her movie debut, played Davis' daughter, living in Europe and unaware that her mother was homeless, and who was now coming to New York to meet her mother for the first time in years.

She turned to horror movies like "Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte" with Olivia de Havilland and “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" with Joan Crawford. Her portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I in "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex," also with "Gone With The Wind" costar de Havilland and Eroll Flynn remains one of the greatest portrayals of that historical character.

So here's to Bette Davis on the 100th anniversary of her birth in Lowell, Massachusetts. "I'm a Yankee girl," she said: not a baseball reference but a New England reference. She was spunky, didn't suffer fools lightly and will forever be in the pantheon of movie icons.