"I would rather have been a pianist than anything," Sybil Thorndike said late in her life, but posterity would never know her as anything other than a majestic actress of stage and screen, whether alongside Marilyn Monroe and Laurence Olivier, or, most famously, as Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan.

In this authorized biography, written with unique access to the Thorndike family archive and using hundreds of her unpublished letters, Jonathan Croall has written an engaging, sympathetic, yet critical account of one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century. As a young actress, Thorndike spent three years traveling around America, playing over a hundred Shakespearean parts.