All About Eve

This is Scipione Tadolini's sculpture of Eve in the Kibble Palace in Glasgow's Botanic Gardens.

But my thoughts turn to All About Eve, particularly the opening sequence which features a statuette being presented to Eve Harrington, winner of the Sarah Siddons Award, described by Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) as the 'highest honour our theater knows.' The award was fictional, of course, but named after a real person, one of the most famous actresses of the eighteenth century. George Combe, the leading British exponent of phrenology, married her daughter Cecilia, who contributed several chapters to Combe's account of their tour of the United States in the late 1830s, one of the strangest travel books I have read.

But what I didn't know was there now really is a Sarah Siddons Award, created in 1952 in a kind of tribute to Mankiewicz's film. And in 1967 it actually was won by an Eve - Eve Arden. Wikipedia is a wonderful thing.