Bruce Davis Dead: Longtime AMPAS Chief Executive Was 83

Bruce Davis, who served as chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for more than 20 years, has died. He was 83. Davis died Saturday following a battle with leukemia, his wife, Joann, told The Hollywood Reporter. Davis joined the Academy in 1981, rising through ranks and becoming executive director in 1989, a role in which he remained until his retirement in 2011. 'I don't think I've been bored for a minute in 30 years here,' Davis told The Associated Press upon his retirement. 'I feel like such a rube sometimes. To this day, when I get out of the car on Oscar night and step up there onto that carpet, you get that rush of energy. The lights are popping — not that anybody's aiming at me — but still I think it's one of the great rushes, emotionally speaking, that a person can have. I have never gotten tired of that.' Born March 10, 1943 in Washington, D.C., Davis attended Juniata College in Pennsylvania, where he received an undergraduate degree in English, followed by a masters degree in Medieval Literature from the University of Maryland. Davis was named executive administrator of the Academy in 1983, and promoted to executive director of the organization in 1989. He succeeded Jim Roberts, who had served in the role since 1971. During the remainder of his tenure, Davis presided over day-to-day operations and staffing, which grew nearly four-fold to 200. He was one of the earliest proponents for the Academy museum, which finally was realized when the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened on Wilshire Boulevard in 2021. In 2022, his monumental history of Hollywood's film Academy was published. Part memoir and part chronicle, The Academy and the Award: The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was 12 years in the making. One of many interesting nuggets of info in the book was a possible solving of the mystery of who coined the name Oscar for the Academy Awards statue, with evidence pointing toward Eleanore Lilleberg, an assistant in the early days of the Academy. His research brought him to a small museum, in Green Valley, CA, named for and devoted to Eleanore's woodcarver and gemologist brother Einar. In an unfinished autobiography, Einar explained that Eleanore appropriated the name 'Oscar' from a Norwegian army veteran they had known in Chicago. Like the statuettes, he always 'stood straight and tall.' Davis went on to find a 1944 newspaper interview with one colleague and another's oral history lending support to the Eleanore Lilleberg theory. 'Unsought though it was, the credit for originating one of the world's best-known nicknames should almost certainly belong to her,' he wrote. In addition to his wife, Davis also is survived by their four daughters, according to THR.