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Monday 7 December 2015

Katharine the great



Katharine Hepburn
Picture: AFP
Katharine Hepburn.
The great Hollywood director Frank Capra once said: "There are actresses and actresses ? and then there is Hepburn." Bart Barnes recalls the life and times of the American legend who died on Sunday, aged 96.

Katharine Hepburn was an actress of breathtaking talent and unsurpassed durability. In a film and stage career that spanned more than five decades, she became a popular legend to millions.

Hepburn won four Academy Awards for acting, more than anyone, and she was nominated for eight others. Her Oscars for best actress were spread across a 48-year period from 1933 to 1981.

The first was for Morning Glory, in which Hepburn played a small-town New England girl who conquers the New York stage. The last was for On Golden Pond, a poignant drama in which she played� 69-year-old Ethel Thayer, caring for her ailing husband of� 50 years in the twilight of their life together, as they revisit the summer vacation home of their youth.

The others came for 1968's The Lion in Winter, in which she was King Henry II's ageing and troubled queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine; and for 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, where Hepburn and Spencer Tracy played a white liberal couple whose daughter brings home her black fiance.

That was the last of nine films in which Hepburn and Tracy played opposite each other. Off the screen, they had a warm and enduring personal relationship that began with their first film together, Woman of the Year, in 1942, after Tracy and his wife had separated. But he took the Catholic Church's admonition against divorce seriously. Although Hepburn and Tracy were frequent companions for 25 years, they never married or lived together openly, and they booked separate hotel suites when travelling together. He died soon after Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was released.


Over the years, Hepburn's theatrical roles ranged from such Shakespearean stage heroines as Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra to the society girl Tracy Lord in the film and play The Philadelphia Story.

She proved herself to be one of the great tragediennes of the screen in Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night, a� 1962 film in which she played the tormented and drug-addicted Mary Tyrone, based on the author's mother. Many critics thought that to have been her finest role.

Unlike most of the motion picture industry's leading actresses of the 1930s and 1940s, Hepburn's artistic stature did not decline as she aged. If anything, it improved, and she continued to play opposite top actors and command the best scripts even into her 70s.

Neither beautiful nor sexy by conventional Hollywood standards, Hepburn had what she once described as an "angular face and body, and I suppose an angular personality". She had freckles and copper-reddish hair and a voice that Tallulah Bankhead said sounded like "nickels dropping in a slot machine".
 
But there was a mystique about her and a style and presence on the stage and screen that her fans found electric and captivating, and she could infuse the most ordinary of acts with drama and meaning.

Her first film director, George Cukor, spotted this quality in Hepburn's initial screen test simply by the way in which she bent down, picked up a glass of champagne from the floor, then turned and faced the camera. She had a sensitivity to the camera unlike anyone else he'd seen, said Cukor, who would direct Hepburn in films, off and on, for the next 50 years. David O. Selznick, the executive producer of her first movie, Bill of Divorcement in 1932, found her stunning in one of the film's early scenes when all she did was walk into a room, stretch out her arms and lie down in front of a fireplace.
 
Tennessee Williams said she was "a playwright's dream � a dream actress" after seeing her performance as the rich and possessive Violet Venable in the 1959 film version of his play Suddenly Last Summer, which also produced an Oscar nomination for Hepburn.

Frank Capra, the great Hollywood director, once said: "There are actresses and actresses � then there is Hepburn."

In all, she appeared in 42 films, and there was always a lively debate among her followers over which of her roles was the best. Long Day's Journey into Night and her four Oscar-winning pictures were among the perennial favorites, as was The African Queen, a� 1951 movie based on a novel by C.S.Forester.

In that film Hepburn played the part of Rose Sayer, a proper and middle-aged British spinster who falls in love with a gin-swilling, ne'er-do-well riverboat pilot, played by Humphrey Bogart, in German East Africa during the early years of World War I.

The African Queen marked a major turning point in Hepburn's career. Until then she had been known primarily for roles in which she played intelligent, independent, well-bred, well-connected and well-off young women. Her later roles tended to be more serious than those early in her career, and she was often cast as a middle-aged or elderly woman attempting to cope with a variety of cares and problems.
 
She shunned television until late in her career, then in 1975 won an Emmy Award for best actress for Love Among the Ruins, an Edwardian comedy about a former Shakespearean actress who is sued for breach of promise by a young man whose marriage proposal she had accepted. She played opposite Laurence Olivier, whose performance won an Emmy for best actor.

As a young Hollywood actress, Hepburn was often at odds with the major film studios, which disliked the fact that she would accept only the roles that suited her. She had an independent spirit that led some producers and directors to view her as "an ornery, opinionated snob". She never had a press agent, she often refused to co-operate with film studio publicists, and for years she did not grant media interviews.

If the bulb of a camera flashed from the audience when Hepburn was on the live stage, she would often stop the performance, deliver a sharp tongue-lashing to the miscreant and then begin the scene over again.

In her manner of dress, she was equally unconventional. Her customary attire was a turtleneck sweater, men's trousers and an odd black hat, and it often appeared that much of her clothing was 20 or 30 years old. The Council of Fashion Designers of America gave her an award in 1986 for demonstrating "what American fashion was all about even before any of us thought of designing it".
Hepburn's response: "Imagine, the original bag lady getting an award for the way she dresses."

A physical fitness enthusiast, she often played tennis before breakfast, swam outdoors regularly, even in the winter, and whenever possible rode a bicycle instead of riding in a car. She was once the runner-up in the Connecticut women's golf championship

She was often imperious, both on stage and off, but she could also be sensitive and considerate of others. In the summer of 1980, when On Golden Pond was being filmed at Big Squam Lake, New Hampshire, she became concerned that the activity might disturb the region's regular summer residents.

One day she walked over to the cottage nearest to where the movie was being filmed. "I'm Katharine Hepburn. We're making a movie next door, and I hope we're not ruining your summer," she told the startled occupants.

Her first movie role opposite Spencer Tracy came in 1942 in Woman of the Year and it brought a fourth Oscar nomination. In that film, Hepburn was Tess Harding, a smart, sophisticated but cold newspaper columnist who is humanised by Tracy, as the newspaper's down-to-earth sports editor.

At 170 centimetres, with high heels and a hairstyle that made her look even taller, Hepburn appeared at their first meeting to tower over the 175-centimetre Tracy. "I'm afraid I am a little tall for you, Mr Tracy," she is said to have observed at their first meeting on the set of Woman of the Year.

"Don't worry, Miss Hepburn," Tracy is reported to have answered. "I'll cut you down to my size."
There was an electricity and a rapport between them that was soon apparent to others on the movie set, and it would delight millions of moviegoers for the next 25 years.

Off the screen they were together often, if not constantly. Hepburn wrote daily letters to Tracy during a 10-week period in the jungles of what then was the Belgian Congo while filming The African Queen.

Over the years she tried to encourage and support Tracy in his frequent battles with alcoholism, and when his health began to fail in the mid-1960s she reduced her own professional commitments substantially in order to care for him.

"I have had 20 years of perfect companionship with a man among men," she said of Tracy in a 1963 interview.

After his 1967 death, Hepburn resumed an energetic and ambitious acting career, although afflicted with a palsy that made her head shake, and it was during this period that she recorded some of her finest performances.

The year after On Golden Pond, she did a play that also dealt with problems of growing old, West Side Waltz, in which she played an elderly pianist. The part required her to learn to play a piano well enough to look realistic at it on stage while the theatre sound system played the music on tape.

Two years later, she starred in a movie, The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley, a comedy about an elderly woman who hires a professional hit man to eliminate her ageing contemporaries who have lost interest in living.

Well into her 70s, she could easily have retired, but she preferred not to. "Work is the only thing that ever made anyone happy," she once said. "The notion that work is a burden is a terrible mistake."

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