Nevertheless, she was so successful for the studio that she was labeled "the fourth Warner brother."

By the end of the 1930s Davis was known as "First Lady of the American Screen" and was the industry's top-ranked female draw. Among her most important performances in that decade were So Big (1932), with Barbara Stanwyck; The Cabin in the Cotton (1932), in which she captured the bitchiness of a teenage slattern so well that roles with similar qualities became identified with her; Ex-Lady (1933), an inferior work in which she first had star billing; and Fog over Frisco (1934), junk kept afloat by Davis's excellence. In 1934 she won a fight with Warner Brothers for permission to film Of Human Bondage on loan-out to RKO, and her role as the ruthless cockney waitress Mildred, opposite Leslie Howard, established her, after twenty-two tries, as a major actress. In Bordertown (1935) she had a powerful mad scene. Playing an actress on the skids in Dangerous (1935), she won her first Academy Award, which she and others claimed she had deserved for Of Human Bondage. Upon accepting the award, she quipped that its backside resembled her spouse's, which led to its nickname, "Oscar." The Petrified Forest (1936) revealed her strength in a subdued dramatic role. Davis's biggest conflict with Warner Brothers was a dispute over a role in 1936 that led to her suspension and stopped her salary of $5,000 a week. She was offered $50,000 to make two films in Europe for the British filmmaker Ludovic Toeplitz, but Warner Brothers issued an injunction while she was in London. Davis took the studio to court, but her contract was upheld. She was also liable for all court costs, but in 1938 the studio agreed to cover a generous portion of them. This did not, however, end the star's frequent hostility toward management, which often prompted her to walk off sets claiming illness or exhaustion, sometimes feigned, sometimes real. She appeared in Marked Woman (1937); and in Kid Galahad (1937) as Edward G. Robinson's moll. For Jezebel (1938), as a headstrong southern belle under William Wyler's brilliant direction, she snared her second Oscar. That year Davis and Nelson divorced. Davis's other films of the 1930s include The Sisters (1938); Dark Victory (1939), a favorite in which she played a dying society lass and for which she won an Academy Award nomination; The Old Maid (1939), costarring with her contemporary rival, Miriam Hopkins; The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939), her first Technicolor movie; and All This and Heaven Too (1940).