B D Hyman

Vocation

Family

American author and pastor. The daughter of film star Bette Davis and artist William Grant Sherry, she was adopted in 1950 by Davis's fourth husband Gary Merrill. She appeared briefly as an infant in her mother's film Payment on Demand (1951). Under the stage name B.D. Merrill, she played a minor role as the next door neighbor's daughter in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), in which her mother co-starred with Joan Crawford. Hyman wrote two books highly critical of her mother, My Mother's Keeper (1985) and Narrow Is the Way (1987). In her 1987 memoirs "This 'n That", Davis wrote a "letter" to her daughter in which she describes some of the inaccuracies in Hyman's book. A born-again Christian, Hyman is the head of her own ministry and pastor of her church in Charlottesville, Virginia. She has written three books which were published by her ministry: Oppressive Parents: How to Leave Them and Love Them (1992); The Church is Not the Bride (2000); and The Rapture, the Tribulation, and Beyond (2002). Link to Wikipedia biography