This was the first movie Bette Davis made under her contract to Warner Bros., the studio under which she did most of her best-known work of the 1930s and '40s. Her earlier six films were made for various studios, (including Universal, RKO and Columbia) all of which let her go.
George Arliss called Bette Davis on the telephone and asked her to audition for the role of his fiancée. Davis thought that somebody was playing a practical joke on her. After she realized it was indeed Arliss, she rushed over to the studio to audition and got the part.
George Arliss and Ivan F. Simpson played the same roles ten years earlier in the silent The Man Who Played God (1922).