When Katharine Hepburn arrived in Hollywood in 1932, RKO studio executives described her as looking 'like a cross between a horse and a monkey'. But she soon confounded everyone by emerging, with her high cheekbones and 'natural' looks, as a rare beauty. She also displayed both an imperturbable sense of humour and an intelligent sensibility: nobody on screen could be so funny and so moving in making a fool of herself, or so touching in reclaiming her dignity.Her career, which straddles seven decades, follows no conventional pattern, but from her debut, opposite John Barrymore in A Bill of Divorcement, she was a breath of fresh air. Her screen personae have ranged from the headstrong girl of her early appearances to the vaguely authoritative spinster of later films; her performances have won her a string of accolades, from her first Oscar for Morning Glory in 1933 to her fourth for On Golden Pond in 1981 - with which she became the first (and to date only) winner of four Best Actress Oscars, from a record 12 nominations.Along the way, she co-starred with Cary Grant, Humphrey Bogart, Montgomery Clift, Spencer Tracy and Peter O'Toole, while her off-screen partnerships included romances with director John Ford, dashing young millionaire Howard Hughes, her agent Leland Hayward and, most famously and most enduringly, Spencer Tracy, from whom she was seldom apart for 27 years.But she was never anyone else's but her own woman, insisting on and retaining the respect of all who worked with her. She refused to give in to the studio's publicity demands, avoiding interviews and always wearing trousers off the set. With her fierce no-nonsense beauty - to which the 150 sumptuous photographs in this book amply testify - her strong-minded outspokenness and her controlled yet sparkling performances, she will always be one of the cinema's most seductive illustrations of the advantages of independence. Read Less