Remembering Katharine Hepburn
If acting prowess is to be assessed by awards, Katharine Hepburn wins hands down with four Oscars for acting — the most ever — right from her third film to her third-last in an over six decade career as a leading lady. But she was famous for portraying feisty, independent-minded women, as she was herself in real life.
Be it the skinny maid of The African Queen(1951), the supportive mother in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) or the imprisoned but irrepressible Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion In Winter (1968), Katharine Houghton Hepburn (1907-2003), whose 110th birth anniversary is on May 12, was not only a gifted performer but also a “modern woman”.
Outspoken and assertive, she believed in living her life and shaping her career on her own terms. One example is telling: Fond of wearing trousers in the 1930s - much before they became accepted fashion for women, she once walked around the studio in her underwear when the costume department “stole” her pair from her dressing room, refusing to put anything else on until they were returned.
She never sought publicity, once recounting: “Once a crowd chased me for an autograph. ‘Beat it’, I said, ‘go sit on a tack!’ ‘We made you’, they said. ‘Like hell you did’, I told them.” Hepburn appeared in 52 films from 1928 to 1994 where her rather sharp features and distinctive voice set her apart. Apart from the three Oscar-winning or Oscar-nominated roles above in which she held her own against male stalwarts like Humphrey Bogart, Peter O’Toole and Spencer Tracy, she had many other memorable roles.
Married in 1928 but separated amicably from her husband in 1934 (confessing she had treated him rather badly), she went on to have a quarter-century-long relationship (never publicised) with Spencer Tracy. However, she was never interested in marriage quipping: “If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.” Her last appearance was in TV movie “One Christmas” (1994) where in her last line, she delivered what could be her own epitaph: “I can sit back in my old age and not regret a single moment, not wish to change a single thing....” — IANS
