Bette Davis and Joan Crawford are two of cinema's biggest icons both enjoying careers that spanned five decades, Davis starred in eighty seven movies and Crawford eighty one.
However it was their long standing fued for which they are most famous as the pair waged war against each other but, for the most, kept it out of the press and away from their fans.
One of them lies slumped on the floor while the other stands over her viciously kicking her in the head. While this was only a scene from That Ever Happened to Baby Jane? art seemed to imitate life.
The violence and hate between these two women towards each other was very real as Davis, the attacker in the above mentioned scene, took acting one step further as she made contact with Crawford's head gashing her scalp which required stitches.
And while the pair always played down their hatred of each other it was a rivalry that lasted thirty years and went with them to their graves.
And it was over a man that these two icons of the big screen fell out.
It all started back in 1935 when Davis was just twenty seven years old and had been married to her childhood sweetheart for three years.
The actress was working on Dangerous, for which she won her first Best Actress Oscar, opposite Franchot Tone.
Davis' marriage was struggling and it soon became evident that she was attracted to Tone. She revealed years later: "I fell in love with Franchot, professionally and privately. Everything about him reflected his elegance, from his name to his manners."
But Joan Crawford, MGM's sex siren who Bette accused of using sex to further her career, got to Tone before she did.
Crawford married the actor by the time filming on Dangerous was completed. The hostility between the pair became all too clear at the Oscars when Crawford failed to congratulate Davis for her win.
Davis won a second Oscar for Jezebel in 1938 and she was the biggest movie star, a crown which she lost to Crawford in the mid forties.
But by the sixties their fortunes had changed and they were both considered box office poison until Crawford suggested that they star together in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
Although it resurrected their career there were rumours of on-set bickering as well as hints that Crawford was drinking.
But their rivalry resurfaced in 1968 when Davis discovered that Tone was dying from lung cancer. But Crawford nursed her ex-husband until he passed away as well as organising the scattering of his ashes.
"Even when the poor bastard was dying that bitch wouldn't let him go," said Davis. "She had to go and monopolise him even in death."
Crawford died in 1977 from acute coronary occlusion and, after disinheriting her adopted children, they wrote a book that painted her as a drunken and abusive mother.
After Bette suffered a stroke in 1985 her daughter also published a book called My Mother's keeper which also depicted Bette in negative light. She to disinherited her daughter.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw