During the 1970s and 1980s, she made stage appearances in Bette Davis in Person (1973), in which she chatted about her career with fans, and starred in Miss Moffat (1974), an unsuccessful musical version of The Corn Is Green that folded in Philadelphia. In 1977 Davis was the first woman to receive the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award. She also acted in seven movies, playing secondary or cameo roles, as in Death on the Nile (1978). In 1979 she won an Emmy for Strangers: The Story of a Mother and a Daughter. Her final film of note was The Whales of August (1987), costarring Lillian Gish, in which her talent remained luminous despite the obvious effects of a recent stroke. During her last film, The Wicked Stepmother (1989), she was so dissatisfied with the direction, script, and photography that she quit midway. Davis was a heavy drinker and a five-pack-a-day chain smoker. She was involved in a series of love affairs and had three abortions. Biographers also note her obsessive-compulsive tidiness. Her daughter, B. D. Hyman, wrote two tell-all books about her mother's destructive behavior that led to the pair's estrangement. Davis told her own story in several books, one of which responded to her daughter's charges. Davis's strong will was reflected in her many roles as fiercely independent women, and she acquired an often justified reputation as a willful, bellicose, and impossible-to-work-with virago. Still, many thought her a consummate professional who was always prepared, thoroughly knowledgeable about what was best for her, and simply unwilling to brook anything less from her coworkers. Although Davis often fought for better roles and wasted time in feeble films, her biographer Barbara Leaming insists that, once she was established, she rarely made the best choices, even when she briefly headed her own company. Nevertheless, she played an unusually wide range of demanding characters, from drunks to glamour queens to retiring old maids to lunatics, which made her difficult to type. Even with her commanding versatility, she was best suited for characters, good and bad, who required a brassy but controlled edge, emotional intensity, and depth. Only five feet, two inches tall, she was noted for her unusually large eyes, and in 1982, Kim Carnes had a hit with a song titled "Bette Davis Eyes." Although physical beauty was not her strong point, she could seem strikingly attractive. Upon meeting her, Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures thought she had "as much sex appeal as Slim Summerville," referring to a homely actor of the day.