Hi Hello & Welcome to this week’s look at the movies and movie people that matter to me.
One of the main problems with writing a brief column on legendary Movie icons is of course what on earth do you leave out? The focus of this week’s piece is a classic example. Firstly her body of work in movies is stunning and spans over six decades for goodness sake. Secondly her impact as a strong sharp-witted woman and feminist both on screen and off cannot be underestimated. For she was a genuine trailblazer and ceiling-shatterer. Finally she was of course (as are we all on some level surely) dichotomous as hell, famously spending decades as the ‘other woman’ and mistress to a married Hollywood star.
She truly was and remains one of the most fascinating, enigmatic, knowable but also elusive Hollywood stars of all time.
Her name -
KATHARINE HEPBURN.
Now before I go any further can I state - as I have done many times since starting this column - that the two movies I’ve picked this week are of course just two out of an incredible portfolio. You’ll all have your own favourite Hepburn performances and movies and butter my arse if I couldn’t also name at least a dozen or more movies and performances of hers that I just adore. But two is what I set myself each week (with the odd rare exception) and there it is folks. So that said, let’s go.
Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born May 12, 1907 in Hartford Connecticut, the second of six children. Katharine (or ‘Kathy’ or Kath’ to her family) was born into a close family whose comfortable social status and unconventional opinions fostered self-confidence and independence from the get-go. Her father, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, was a Hartford surgeon and pioneer in fighting venereal disease - her mother, Katharine Houghton, a suffragist and strong advocate of birth control. Born into a progressive household where the Hepburn kids were raised to exercise freedom of speech and encouraged to think and debate on any topic they wished, was it any wonder our girl became the personality she did.
Encouraged by her Father she and her siblings rode, ran, swum, dove, wrestled and played tennis and golf. Every Saturday she went to the movies and, you won’t be surprised to discover, put on plays and performances for family & neighbours - although ‘Kathy’ being ‘Kathy’ she also charged 50 cents and then donated the money to the Navajo people.
Aged 14 Hepburn found her older brother Tom’s body hanging from the rafters of a house the family was visiting in New York City. The Hepburns said they never knew whether he’d committed suicide or not and preferred to leave open the possibility he’d been practicing a magic trick tragically gone wrong. Either way the impact on Hepburn was profound and long-lasting. She went in on herself, shying away from other kids as well as school (requiring her to be privately tutored) and even changed her birth date to match Tom’s as a rather beautiful memorial, only revealing her true date of birth in 1991 in her autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life.
One summer she went total tomboy, cut her hair and called herself Jimmy - "I thought being a girl was really the bunk" she once said, "But there's no bunk about Jimmy." This kid was spunky, single-minded, serious and showy - a fucking handful.
After graduating from her mother’s alma mater - Bryn Mawr - in 1928, our little Katharine-wheel got herself small parts with various stock theater companies, got herself fired from more than one but eventually made her breakthrough in a Broadway play called The Warrior's Husband. Hollywood started sniffing, she landed a screen test for George Cukor (who became a life-long friend), and as a result landed the part of John Barrymore’s daughter in A Bill of Divorcement (1932). She was off into La-La Land. Actually, boy was she off because the next year she won an Oscar with only her third movie (Morning Glory) for fucks sake. Late in life she laughingly said of her younger self, "I am terribly afraid I just assumed I'd be famous”. She got that damn right. What she arguably never got right was her love life however, and shortly after winning her first Oscar she divorced her first (and only) husband - Ludlow Ogden Smith. She confessed late in life that she’d been "… an absolute pig with Luddy, absolute pig. He was an angel. I thought of myself first, and that's a pig, isn't it?".
With an Oscar in the bag ‘Kathy’ cranked out a couple of movies a year, bagged herself another Oscar nom for Alice Adams (1935), and returned to Broadway in a spectacular failure - "The Lake” - which inspired Dorothy Parker to write her famous aphorism "She ran the gamut of emotion from A to B”. She was busy busy busy. Which brings us to the first of the two movies I’ve plucked from her phenomenal portfolio - BRINGING UP BABY (1938).
Like many others (It’s A Wonderful Life immediately springs to mind) this brilliant screwball comedy was neither a critical or commercial success first time around and it took Television to give it the lease of life it always deserved. Nevertheless, for me it’s not only a movie I’ve always loved, it’s one of those movies that rewards the viewer in greater abundance with each and every watch. That’s not so common a thing in a movie I think.
She and Cary Grant are in top form - he as a fumbling paleontologist whose neatly structured life goes to seed immediately he hooks up with an apparently off-her-rocker heiress (Hepburn) - Howard Hawks helms beautifully (in what would be the first of five films with Grant but - interestingly - only movie with Hepburn), and it whip-cracks away from start to finish in the most glorious way.
The critics loved it and audiences in big cities turned out in their thousands, but it failed in the key market of Middle America and having gone wildly over budget, it fell $365,000 short of it’s $1,096,796.23 production cost. The blame was laid squarely at Hepburn's door and the 'box office poison' thing that had been floating around like some evil turd now had serious traction in the minds of many. Posterity however has kicked that crap well into touch and - rightly or wrongly - the movie is the only Howard Hawks in the AFI ‘Top 100 Movies Of All Time’. Also, because the ‘box office poison’ tag had nailed itself good and proper to our girl, Hepburn took (fled) to the stage with ‘The Philadelphia Story’, stormed it, bought the movie rights, then sold the movie rights only on the basis that she recreate and star in the role she’d played so superbly on stage. The rest really is history with regard not just to that stone cold classic but Hepburn’s career also. Not that there weren’t any career trials or tribulations going forward, but the ‘poison’ thing - which I cannot stress enough had really threatened her entire career - would never be raised with the same degree of venom and impact again.
Now I’m afraid I have to take one of my insane leaps forward by saying that over the next three decades Hepburn starred in many truly wonderful films including The Philadelphia Story (1940), Woman Of The Year (1942), Sate Of The Union (1948), Adam’s Rib (1949), The African Queen (1951), The Rainmaker (1956), Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). She was nominated for four more Oscars, shacked up with the love of her life Spencer Tracy in a cottage in the grounds of George Cukor’s capacious estate, and periodically continued to tread her beloved boards on Broadway.
Crazy forward jump landed, we find ourselves then at the second of this week’s movies - THE LION IN WINTER (1968).
This movie - which I love to the moon and back - did not have the most auspicious of beginnings. It was a $150,000 loss on Broadway in 1966 (after a particularly scathing New York Times review) and played for just 92 performances before closing somewhat ignominiously. It won Rosemary Harris a Tony for her ‘Queen Eleanor’, but basically, it bombed like fuck on the New York stage.
Despite this, lunatic producer Martin Poll optioned the movie rights for the play, hired James Goldman (brother of screenwriting legend William) to adapt his stage play for the screen, somehow bagged Peter O’Toole and Hepburn, and was smart enough to hire Anthony Harvey to direct - who then set about being extremely percipient by giving Anthony Hopkins his film debut, then hiring the Haymarket Theatre in London’s West End for six months and letting the cast of seasoned stage actors rehearse the hell out of Goldman’s rich as double thick cream dialogue in a setting within which they all felt seriously comfortable.
Some of you may by now be recoiling in horror that I’ve picked this as one of two Hepburn films to highlight when compared to the phalanx of stone cold classics in which she’s starred, but here’s why.
I’m literally a child of film and theatre, having made my West End debut (in Oliver!) aged 11, immediately followed by two years at the Royal National Theatre (in The Life Of Galileo and The Shoemaker’s Holiday) and a career in theatre up to and including the world premiere of the movie classic All About Eve in the West End in 2019 . Outside of being born into some theatrical dynasty (I wasn’t), theatre’s in my blood kind of thing. But I’ve also been a cinema nut since somehow stumbling across The Ladykillers on telly when I was seven or eight. So here’s the thing, I know that stage plays rarely transfer smoothly seamlessly and certainly visually well to the screen, I get that they rarely if ever measure up visually (or otherwise) to a Welles, Powell & Pressburger, Scorsese or whoever. But, there’s something about a stage adaptation to the screen that I dig the fucking hell out of. Yes a play script and a screenplay are awkward bedfellows etc & yadda, but I love hearing brilliantly written theatrical dialogue brilliantly transferred onto the big screen. Of course what I’m saying I love doesn’t always work - for sure - but, when it does, fuck me sideways, you end up with movies such as Sleuth (1972), One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), The Odd Couple (1968), Twelve Angry Men (1954), Amadeus (1984), The Front Page (1974), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), The Sunshine Boys (1972), Arsenic And Old Lace (1944), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and yes The Philadelphia Story (1940) - to name but eleven. There’s something about them, for all their visual/cinematic shortcomings. There’s something about them for all their (stage) wordiness. There’s something about them I love. And I absolutely find this in THE LION IN WINTER.
The action is mostly contained within a single day (Christmas Eve - so for me it’s a film on my Christmas movie list) and the plot is pretty straight forward (for a 12thC regal-political thriller-potboiler). Where it really flies - as so many of the aforementioned classics do - is in the performances and the dialogue. O’Toole and Hepburn are just fucking exquisite as they swing from letting loose their theatre-animal selves one second to reigning it in the next and reminding us what deft and subtle big screen actors they’ve long been. Hopkins, Nigel Terry and John Castle are fantastic as the horrible heirs and a young Timothy Dalton equally fab as Philip II, King Of France.
But oh, some of the lines. At one point in a moment of tension, Hepburn’s estranged Queen snaps at one of her progeny - “Of course he has a knife! We all have knives. It’s 1183 and we’re barbarians!”. Another scene, another zinger, when Hepburn’s Queen is explaining to her husband’s mistress that the King is basically a tart (like his mistress) - "Henry's bed is his province, he can people it with sheep for all I care. Which, on occasion, he has done." Boom.
But ultimately I’m here for Eleanor and Henry and the mighty duo playing them, the likes of whom we’ll never see again. When Henry calls out to Eleanor, “You know, I hope we never die! Do you think there’s any chance of it?” it’s impossible not to hear it as a question O’Toole is asking Hepburn. Movie stars, like kings and queens, worry over such matters - just as movie lovers, back in the day and now know that for these two celluloid gods, immortality is a given. But more on O’Toole another time (soon).
Hepburn rightly won an Oscar for this movie. She moves the hell out of me in it. Her voice is ageing and cracking and she’s starting to show signs of that head-wobble that can come with a sixth decade of living. She is an ageing queen & warrior in many ways. Hepburn is bruised, battered, broken succumbing to bewilderment. And she shows us this. This is an Actress, an Artist, the spunky kid who charged 50cents for her show to raise money for the Navajo people, who fought for her rights as an employee and then freelance creative, who fought for women’s rights period.
In some ways KATHARINE HEPBURN was more regal than all those who exited the ‘right’ European in-bred birth canal. I think she was a Queen. A beautifully flawed, haughty, wonderful, unknowable, flinty fucking Queen.
There was one more Oscar to come in 1981 for On Golden Pond, with her final movie appearance coming in 1994. On the Queen went until she finally ‘abdicated’ her throne in 2003.
Obvious and a cliche but fuck it I’m gonna say it because she truly deserves it - we’ll never ever see her like again. Never, in a month of millennium’s.
Finally then folks, here’s three pieces really worth your time:
- the first relates to how every chat show had for decades tried to get her onto their show. Then one afternoon in 1973 she turned up unannounced at Dick Cavett’s studio wanting a look around & then suddenly said “Why don’t we just go ahead and do it now?” So they did. Aside from Garbo I’m not sure Cavett would’ve acquiesced for anyone else.
- the second is a lovely interview with the excellent Clive James from 1985
- and the third is a great bio-dive into our girl by the excellent YouTube essayist Be Kind Rewind
That’s your lot for this week then folks.
Good Night & Good Luck, and look after yourselves and each other.
Michael
Just got around to reading this. Thanks for a fab piece on this marvellous actor.
Thank you for this, my absolute favorite!!