Cybill Shepherd arrived in Hollywood carrying the kind of natural, unmanufactured magnetism that the industry spends millions trying to create artificially and almost never quite achieves — discovered as a teenager, launched into film stardom opposite Peter Bogdanovich in The Last Picture Show, and possessed from the very beginning of a confidence and a directness that the men who ran the business found simultaneously irresistible and deeply inconvenient.

She was never the actress who waited quietly in the corner for permission to speak, never the star who smiled and nodded when directors and producers told her who she was supposed to be, and in an industry built on the expectation that beautiful women would remain grateful and compliant, Cybill Shepherd’s particular brand of outspoken, sharp-tongued, uncompromising selfhood was treated not as the extraordinary asset it so clearly was but as a problem to be managed, minimized, and whenever possible, punished — a campaign that lasted the better part of two decades, cost her roles that should have been hers, and drove her from the A-list more than once, until Moonlighting reminded the entire world exactly what it had been so carelessly throwing away, and even then the industry never quite forgave her for being right about herself all along.