Katherine Hepburn
Before
the month of June was out, we here at the editorial board were again contacted
by Weith Koods, artistic director of Cinema Queen Anne, to mark the passing of
yet another true screen legend. I speak of course of the great Katharine
Hepburn who died at Old Saybrook, Connecticut on June 19th, aged
96.
Very
much a recluse in her twilight years, although she made infrequent excursions to
a family home at Old Saybrook where she died, for the most part she lived in a
sprawling New York brownstone house that she had bought way back in the 1930s.
In recent years, by all accounts, there was considerable discord with her
nearest neighbour, the composer Stephen Sondheim, whose late night piano playing
irritated her. After he had written one song late at night, suggested by some to
be ‘You Could Drive A Person Crazy’ although somewhat more likely, as
suggested by Cinema Queen Anne, to have been ‘The Ladies Who Lunch’,
Sondheim looked out of his window to see her glaring malevolently back at him.
The composer went out the next day and bought an electric piano with headphones.
Androgynous,
high cheek boned, in her hey day certainly beautiful in a tomboyish way, with
total disregard for the conventions of Hollywood, she refused to wear make up or
uncomfortable clothes and, along with Great Garbo, she set the fashion for women
to wear trousers. The great love of her life was Spencer Tracy with whom she
conducted a thirty-year affair; Tracy being Catholic would not divorce his wife.
Together they made some fine movies including the brilliant ‘Guess Who's
Coming to Dinner’ (1967) for which she won one of her five Oscars. Tracy and
Hepburn played a determinedly liberal couple whose principles begin to slip when
their daughter (played by Hepburn’s niece Katharine Houghton) announces she is
engaged to a black man played by Sidney Poitier. Directed by Stanley Kramer,
between them they injected exchanges with a depth of emotion rarely seen in
mainstream cinema, for Hepburn was only too aware that Spencer Tracy was dying
– he died ten days after filming ended.
The
following year, 1968, she won another Oscar for her performance opposite the
British stage and screen legend Peter O’Toole in ‘The Lion in Winter’.
Very late in her career another Oscar was forthcoming for ‘On Golden Pond’
(1981); almost fifty years previously she had won her first Oscar for only her
third film, playing a tomboy who longed to be a star in ‘Morning Glory’
(1933). Cinema Queen Anne, though, would argue that her greatest performance
came in David Lean’s ‘Summer Madness’ (1955) playing a lonely American
spinster who finds love in Venice. A personal favourite, well it’s got to be,
as the devouring mother in the film version of Tennessee Williams’
‘Suddenly, Last Summer’ (1959). Another, ‘The African Queen’ (1951) for
which she won her second Oscar as a prissy spinster whose missionary brother has
died and who gradually conceives a tendresse for the gin soaked river trader
played by Humphrey Bogart. Made totally on location in Africa, everyone suffered
from either malaria or diarrhoea. Everyone that is, except for the director John
Houston and Bogart, neither of whom drank any water. Hepburn took a dim view of
their nightly binges and, like her character in the film, found consolation in
the Bible. The formula was repeated twenty years later; ‘Rooster Cogburn’
(1975) brought her together with John Wayne – not as successful commercially
but in the opinion of the editorial board a near equal artistically.
Born
Katharine Houghton Hepburn on May 12th 1907 at Hartford, Connecticut,
the second of six children, her father was a successful urologist who courted
social ostracism by publicising the dangers of venereal disease and her mother
set herself way beyond the pale for the time by campaigning for women’s
rights. An intensely competitive family, her father insisted that all the
children became athletes. Her childhood was dedicated to swimming, riding, golf
and tennis; a regime which, in her own words, made her “very strong and
utterly fearless”. Not so though, for her brother Tommy; when Katharine was 13
she found him hanging from the rafters in the attic.
Her
education was, at first, entrusted to private tutors before attending the
Hartford School for Girls performing, by all accounts, academically dismally.
When she finally moved on to study drama at the austere Bryn Mawr College she
failed to distinguish herself. Despite this upon graduation she immediately
found work with a Baltimore repertory company and, by the end of 1928, she had
succeeded in pulling enough strings to land herself a role as a rich schoolgirl
in ‘These Days’, a play which took her to Broadway. Soon she had married a
well-heeled socialite, Ludlow Ogden Smith, and around this period of time she
acquired both the reputation and the nickname of Katharine of Arrogance, as she
found herself fired from several shows for arguing with the director. To further
her career she denied she was married. Come 1934 that would be for real when
they split up.
Her
breakthrough came when she played an Amazon in ‘The Warrior’s Husband’ on
Broadway. The role required her to enter by leaping down a flight of stairs
whilst carrying a large stag on her shoulders. Seen by an R.K.O. talent scout,
it meant that soon she was on her way to Hollywood. However, her outspoken ways
meant, in effect, she was no more popular with directors and crew in Hollywood
than she had been on Broadway. George Cukor gave her a part opposite John
Barrymore in ‘A Bill of Divorcement’ (1932). Cukor, against the odds, became
a close friend and showed her the difference between stage and film acting. The
training soon bore fruit for, in only her third film, the aforementioned
‘Morning Glory’, she won an Oscar. Over the next few years she was barely
off cameras, by far the best role being the part of Phoebe in a version of J M
Barrie’s ‘Quality Street’ (1937), before seeing out the thirties with a
string of highly successful comedies. ‘Stage Door’ (1937) starring alongside
Ginger Rogers, as the scatter brained heiress in Howard Hawkes’ ‘Bringing Up
Baby’ (1938) in which she played opposite Cary Grant, and working with both
George Cukor and Cary Grant in ‘Holiday’ (1938).
Her
name was put forward for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in ‘Gone With The
Wind’ but her sex appeal was considered insufficient. She returned to the
stage in a part that was specially written for her, ‘The Philadelphia Story’
which became a huge hit. On the advice of Howard Hughes, who by now was her
lover, she bought the rights and would soon appear in a film version alongside
Cary Grant and James Stewart.
1942
would see the first of several films she made with Spencer Tracy, ‘Woman of
the Year’. Alas, for the remainder of the decade the films she made without
Tracy were, for the most part, forgettable until hitting paydirt with ‘The
African Queen’ in 1951. The 1950s would see her performing on stage to huge
acclaim, playing Rosalind in ‘As You Like It’, playing both on Broadway and
in London, and as Epifania in George Bernard Shaw’s ‘The Millionairess’.
She toured Australia with the Old Vic Company in both ‘The Merchant of
Venice’ and ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ before taking ‘The Taming of the
Shrew’ and ‘Measure for Measure’ on a world tour, returning to Shakespeare
again at the birth of the sixties to perform as Viola in ‘Twelfth Night’ in
her home state of Connecticut.
In
her sixties, Hepburn turned to television, playing in ‘The Glass Menagerie’
alongside Sir Laurence Olivier and later in an adaptation of ‘The Corn Is
Green’. It has been suggested that if her film career had ended with the
aforementioned Oscar winning ‘On Golden Pond’ (1981) she would have gone out
on a high. Sadly, she insisted on going on to make the disastrous ‘Grace
Quigley’ (1984) starring opposite Nick Nolte in a sorry tale of an old woman
so sold on euthanasia that she hires a hit man to murder her. She would return
to the television screen twice more before the end of the decade in ‘Mrs
Delafield Wants To Marry’ (1986) and ‘Penthouse Paradise’ (1989).
Hepburn’s
Movieography
A
Bill of Divorcement (1932)
Christopher
Strong (1933)
Morning
Glory (1933)
Little
Women (1933)
Spitfire
(1934)
The
Little Minister (1934)
Break
of Hearts (1935)
Alice
Adams (1935)
Sylvia
Scarlett (1935)
Mary
of Scotland (1936)
A
Woman Rebels (1936)
Quality
Street (1937)
Stage
Door (1937)
Bringing
Up Baby (1938)
Holiday
(1938)
The
Philadelphia Story (1940)
Woman
of the Year (1942)
Keeper
of the Flame (1942)
Dragon
Seed (1944)
Without
Love (1945)
Undercurrent
(1946)
The
Sea of Grass (1947)
Song
of Love (1947)
State
of the Union (1948)
Adam's
Rib (1949)
The
African Queen (1951)
Pat
and Mike (1952)
Summer
Madness (1955)
The
Rainmaker (1956)
The
Iron Petticoat (1956)
Desk
Set (1957)
Suddenly,
Last Summer (1959)
Long
Day's Journey Into Night (1962)
Guess
Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
The
Lion in Winter (1968)
Madwoman
of Chaillot (1969)
The
Trojan Women (1971)
A
Delicate Balance (1973)
Rooster
Cogburn (1975)
Olly,
Olly, Oxen Free (1978)
On
Golden Pond (1981)
Grace
Quigley (1984)
Love
Affair (1994)