‘I don’t want to act with you ever again,’ Katharine Hepburn told John Barrymore after appearing with him in A Bill of Divorcement. ‘I didn’t know you had,’ came the smart rejoinder. Hollywood stars divide into those who do and those who are. The divine Kate, with her sawn-off cheekbones, narrow eyes and weird Yankee version of a Southern drawl — ‘Yow owuld foowul!’ she shouts at Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond — belongs firmly in the latter category.

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