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 humor 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. According to George Cukor, her friend and director of eight of her films, she was “never a ‘love-me-I’m-a- lovable-little-girl’ kind of actress. She always challenged the audience, and that wasn’t the fashion in those days.”

Her career, which spans seven decades, follows no conventional pattern--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 her later films; her performances have won her a string of accolades, from her first Oscar for Morning Gloryin 1933 to her fourth for On Golden Pondin 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 costarred with Carey Grant (in, among others, The Philadelphia Story,)Humphrey Bogart (The African Queen), Montgomery Clift (Suddenly Last Summer),Spencer Tracy (in nine films, culminating with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner),and Peter O’Toole (The Lion in Winter), 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 always 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 pants 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.