The film stars Bette Davis as a beautiful but self-centered woman who has many suitors but marries Job Skeffington, played by Claude Rains, solely to save her brother from going to prison.

Disgusted by the arrangement, in part because of his prejudice against Skeffington being Jewish, Trippy leaves home to fight in the Lafayette Escadrille in World War I.

Fanny enjoys playing the wealthy socialite, stringing along a persistent quartet of suitors who are unfazed by her marriage, as well as much younger lovers.

Although Job fears for his child and tries unsuccessfully to explain to her the nature of prejudice she will encounter as a Jew abroad, he finally, tearfully and joyfully, says yes.

Fanny has a series of affairs, living well on the extremely generous settlement Job has left her – half his fortune – and hardly giving a thought to her daughter, whom she does not see for many years.

Shortly before her daughter's departure, Fanny suffers the ultimate humiliation when one of her old beaux makes what she at first believes to be a sincere marriage proposal, only to withdraw it when he begins to suspect, incorrectly, that she is no longer wealthy.

When she does finally enter the parlor, Job moves to her, stumbles and falls: He is blind (due to torture in a Nazi concentration camp).

"[3] Paul Henreid says he was offered the male lead but turned it down as he felt he would not be convincing as a man who looked on passively while his wife had affairs.

Director Vincent Sherman, with whom Davis had once been romantically involved, admitted to the detectives investigating the incident, "If you asked everyone on the set who would have committed such a thing, everyone would raise their hand!"

[1] Film critic and author James Agee reviewed it in 1944: "...essentially Mr. Skeffington is just a super soap opera, or an endless woman's-page meditation on What to Do When Beauty Fades. "