A feminist in Hollywood
By Geraldine Baum
Katharine Hepburn, who transcended her screen roles by showing several generations how to be a woman in a way that combined sublime beauty and sexuality with fiery intelligence, died last Sunday. She was 96.
With Hepburn's death, America's connection to the great era of the 'talkies' and her great voice is over. And whose voice has been more memorable? But even more than her voice, Hepburn will be immortalized for the ground she broke for women. With her unique style, the trousers and the sleek high-necked dresses, she played a strong female presence within traditional boy/girl stories.
“I think every actress in the world looked up to her with a kind of reverence, a sense of ‘If only I could be like her,’” Elizabeth Taylor, who starred with Hepburn in ‘Suddenly Last Summer’, said.
Sidney Poitier, who starred with Hepburn in ‘Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,’ said: “We've lost a truly remarkable artiste, a fantastic human being, a spectacular presence in the American cinema and a first-rate lady.”
Hepburn effortlessly created characters who had all the force of the feminists to come two decades later, without violating the decorum of the day. The similarities between Hepburn's film persona and her own strength of personality and will made her a role model for generations of women.
Her patrician good looks also set a new standard for beauty. She was stunning with alabaster skin, high, pronounced cheekbones and a Modigliani neck but in a complicated way.
One of the rare Hollywood icons whose performances lived up to her legendary status, Hepburn displayed a remarkable longevity. Her film career spanned seven decades, and she won three of her four Oscars for best actress after the age of 60. No one has surpassed her record of four Oscars for best actress and 12 nominations in the best actress category. (Meryl Streep bettered Hepburn's nominations total only this year with 13 nominations, but they came in both actress categories.)
Hepburn won Oscars for “Morning Glory” (1933), “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner” (1967), “The Lion in Winter” (1968) and “On Golden Pond” (1981).
In a screen career that spanned the evolution of movies from the first talkies to films with space-age special effects, Hepburn stayed true to what she believed was any movie's true foundation: good acting.
Critical to her success were her collaborations with Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and, most famously, Spencer Tracy, whom she first appeared opposite in “Woman of the Year” in 1942. Though she was romantically entangled with dashing men of her day, notably millionaire Howard Hughes and agent Leland Hayward, Tracy was the love of her life. Their on-screen chemistry carried nine movies, with Tracy proving the perfect backboard, a strong, secure man for Hepburn to bounce her feminist ideals off. Her romance with the married Tracy endured for more than 25 years until his death on June 10, 1967. Tracy, a devout Roman Catholic, and his wife, Louise, had long been separated, but they never divorced.Hepburn's upper-class background was good training for the characters she played. The second of six children of Thomas Norval Hepburn, a prominent New England surgeon, and Katharine Martha Houghton, a committed suffragette and early crusader for birth control, Hepburn adored her parents and was devoted to the family atmosphere of spiritual freedom and physical discipline.
She was drawn to the stage at age 12 and played roles in student productions through her years at Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia. After graduation in 1928, she made her professional debut as a lady-in-waiting in a Baltimore stock production of 'Czarina'.
It was also in that year that she married a Philadelphia socialite, Ludlow Ogden Smith. But she neglected him for an acting career in New York and was divorced after six years. In her memoir, she confessed: “What the hell would I have done without Luddy, my protector? I would have been frightened away from this big city, and I would have shrivelled up and died. And Luddy, all he wanted was me, and of course all I wanted was to be a great big star in the movies...”
By the fall of 1928, she was on Broadway, and earning a reputation less for great performances in front of an audience than for clashing with directors and crews behind the scenes. In 1932, she was hired, fired and then recast for the leading part in Broadway's “The Warrior's Husband”.
After that, RKO offered her a film contract. Having no apparent interest in Hollywood, she demanded what was then considered an absurd $1,500-a-week fee. To her surprise, the studio accepted, and she headed west.
With her head held high and her arrogance apparent, she also assumed she had, and in fact received, the respect of studio moghuls such as Louis B. Mayer, who weren't quite used to such a woman. In many of her early films, such as Cukor's “Little Women” (1933) and “Sylvia Scarlett” (1936), in which she disguised herself as a boy, and “A Woman Rebels” (1936), she presaged the concerns of 1960s feminists, while at the same time baffling audiences with her boyish body and sometimes metallic voice.
“What she brought us was a new kind of heroine, modern and independent,” said Jeanine Basinger, chairman of film studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn.
Despite endings that often found the wilful Hepburn dissolving girlishly into the arms of a strong man, her films never really had her betraying feminist principles.
In 1962, she gave one of her most praised performances as the drug-addicted Mary Tyrone in Sidney Lumet's memorable film version of Eugene O'Neill's ‘Long Day's Journey Into Night’.
After that, Hepburn took time off to help care for the ailing Tracy. His health improved just enough in 1967 for them to do a last picture together, “Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.”
That Stanley Kramer film ends with a scene of them together that most assume reflected their great affection for each other. The picture also revealed an unusually emotive Hepburn. Tracy died shortly after the production finished, and Hepburn went on to win an Oscar for her performance.Lights on Broadway were dimmed at 8 p.m. last Tuesday night in her honour. During the publicity campaign for her 1991 memoir, she told several interviewers that she regretted neither having no children nor not marrying Tracy. The book, however, prompted her to finally break her silence about this most important bond in her life. Reporters brought up Tracy, and she talked frankly, often poignantly, about the joy and frustrations of her life with the complicated actor.
She ended the chapter titled ‘Love’ this way: “I have no idea how Spence felt about me. I can only say, I think that if he hadn't liked me, he wouldn't have hung around. As simple as that. He wouldn't talk about it, and I didn't talk about it. We just passed 27 years together in what was to be absolute bliss. It is called LOVE.”
An extremely private person throughout her life, she ended a few of her interviews telling reporters that one of the best things about death would be that it meant “no more inter views.”
(Los Angeles Times)
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