Bette Davis was one of Hollywood's most durable, feisty and, unusually for film stars - genuinely witty heroines. Her career spanned some fifty years, and more than a hundred movies: even at the very end of her life she was appearing in Lindsay Anderson's The Whales of August with the equally venerable Lilian Gish. She was famously difficult in later life, bitchy towards co-stars like Joan Crawford, and consumed legendary quantities of alcohol. She has been the subject of several biographies, but so red-blooded was her character, and so prolific her career, that another is not too many. Ed Sikov has done numerous new interviews for this book. He also analyses the evolving appeal of Bette Davis to a modern audience - she, and the redoubtable female roles she made her own - has become a major gay icon, for example. And above all, she is simply entertaining to read about: of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, as Sikov recounts, she quipped, 'I played Baby Jane, and Joan Crawford played...whatever'.