Critics tried to run her down with labels like the "East Coast ice maiden" and "box-office poison", but she managed to frustrate them time and again by delivering hits, winning awards and making wisecracks. When a reporter asked her if she was afraid of death, she quipped, "Not at all. It would be a great relief. Then I wouldn’t have to talk to you."

Studio bosses soon realised that she was not one to bow and scrape before them. Seeing Katherine coming to work in overalls or dungarees, they warned her not to wear such stuff. When she refused to comply, they got her jeans stolen. "Unless you give me back my pants, I intend to walk around naked," she threatened. Making her intention clear, she came out of her dressing room in just her silk underpants. Her jeans were returned in no time.

Her "sub-collegiate idiotic" behaviour, as director George Cukor put it, was evident from her antics, like carrying a monkey around the studio and tying it to the desks of persons she wanted to irritate. When she had to persuade MGM head Louis B. Mayer to make a film starring her, she deliberately wore high heels to tower above the pint-sized movie moghul.

After tasting success on Broadway, she made her film debut in A Bill of Divorcement (1933). Morning Glory (1933) brought her the first of her record four Oscars, but she didn’t even attend the awards ceremony, declaring that "prizes are nothing, my prize is my work."

When she was introduced to top actor Spencer Tracy by screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, she blurted out, "I’m afraid I’m a little for tall for you, Mr Tracy". Mankiewicz then remarked, "Don’t worry, Kate, he’ll soon cut you down to size." On screen, Katherine managed to hold her own against him, but off screen, she fell in love with him to the point of subservience. Her friends and acquaintances were surprised to see a fiercely independent woman going out of her way to please and serve her lover. Throughout their long romance, she had to contend with the ‘other woman’ tag, for Tracy never divorced his wife.

As a bickering couple, Tracy and Hepburn were a big hit in romantic comedies like Woman of the Year (1942) and Adam’s Rib (1949). In the latter, their battle of the sexes took place in a courtroom, with both playing lawyers fighting a murder case.

Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967) was their last film together. (Tracy died shortly after it was completed). Cast as a woman caught between her daughter, who wants to marry an Afro-American, and her husband, who does not approve of the match, Katherine gave one of her most sensitive performances. Both were nominated for Oscars, but she was the one who got it. "I suspect my award was really given to the two of us," she said.

As always, she didn’t come to collect her trophy. But she did send a cable expressing her thanks, with characteristic wit: "I’m enormously touched. It is gratifying to find someone else voted for me apart from myself."

When asked why she was a perennial absentee at the Academy Awards ceremony, she said: "It has to be because I’m afraid I’m not going to win. If I were an honest person, which obviously I’m not, I would refuse to compete. But I do say to myself, ‘I wonder if I’m going to win it.’"

In The Lion in Winter (1968), she was cast as King Henry II’s estranged wife, whose three sons were vying for the throne. She dominated the proceedings with her stately presence and eclipsed even a fine actor like Peter O’Toole, who played the King. An Oscar, of course, was a foregone conclusion.

The fourth one came when she was over 74, for On Golden Pond (1981). Here she was again doing the balancing act, trying to be both a good wife and a good mother. In real life, Katherine divorced her one and only husband, a wealthy socialite, after just six years of marriage. And she never became a mother. "Only when a woman decides not to have children can she live like a man. That’s what I’ve done," said the actress who was a role model for many women.

While her contemporaries kept running out of steam and fading into oblivion, she continued to baffle people with her staying power and ability to bounce back. Indeed, Katherine Hepburn was not only a great actress but also a great survivor.