Dark Victory : The Life of Bette Davis

'They don't make Hollywood icons like they used too...as much an exercise in nostalgia as a fascinating slice of cultural reportage' Val Hennessy, Daily Mail The polite verdict on Bette Davis would be that she was one of Hollywood's most durable, feisty and, unusually for film stars - genuinely witty heroines.

A more frank estimation would be that she was a crazy harridan, a barking old witch and an absolute monster.

Ed Sikov offers ample evidence of both. 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.

In later life she was if anything even more difficult, bitchy towards co-stars like Joan Crawford, and consumed legendary quantities of alcohol.

But 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'. 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 - as proved by the terrific reviews this book received in hardback.

Ed Sikov's previous biographies include On Sunset Boulevard: The Life and Times of Billy Wilde and Mr Strangelove: A Biography of Peter Sellers.

He has taught at Columbia University, and lives in New York.