The Divine Kate

They just don’t make movie stars and actresses like Katherine Hepburn anymore.

She was a true original.

More on Miss Hepburn:

Roger Ebert has written a beautiful eulogy to this most treasured American icon.

A couple of my favorite anecdotes, anecdotes which have entered into the realm of myth in my own mind, having studied Katherine Hepburn’s life and acting for years:

Dorothy Parker saw Hepburn in a Broadway play, early on in Hepburn’s career. Parker, true to form, wrote that Hepburn displays the “gamut of emotions, from A to B.” My take on this is: Not every actor is capable of going from A to Z. A to Z is extremely over-rated. The greats, the ones who are burned into the psyche of movie-goers everywhere, pretty much do ONE thing, and do it better than anybody else on the planet. Spencer Tracy. Cary Grant. Humphrey Bogart. These are not people who transform themselves endlessly, from part to part to part. They are not chameleons. You always recognize Humphrey Bogart. But that does not diminish the accomplishment. More than anyone else in the world, they could bring that one thing, that one essence, to life — It’s like a kind of magic.

Katherine Hepburn said, about herself: “I strike people as peculiar in some way, although I don’t quite understand why. Of course, I have an angular face, an angular body and, I suppose, an angular personality, which jabs into people.”

KNOW THYSELF. It is perhaps the most important thing to have, to own, if you want to be an actor. Know thyself. Easier said than done.

The following snippet, offered up by Ebert, brought tears to my eyes. Katherine Hepburn obviously developed a pronounced tremor in her face and voice, as she got older. An interviewer (a rude a**hole, if you ask me) asked her about her decision to continue acting, even though her face and voice shook. She replied (and I can just imagine HOW she said it), “What choice do I have?”

Take THAT.

A good friend of hers was being interviewed last night on CNN or something, and of course, questions came up about her relationship with Spencer Tracy, and whether or not Katherine Hepburn had any regrets. The friend answered, “Oh, no no no. Kate never wasted time with regrets.”

I should have my own personal Hepburn/Tracy film festival. Is there anything more enjoyable than watching the two of them spar, trying to best each other intellectually? Is there anything sexier? More erotic? Their wars of words…God, to have a relationship like that! They battle, they spit out insults at one another, and yet the overriding feeling is that all they want to do is throw each other down.

Do actors still know how to do that?

Of course, the material now is not half as good as the material was back then. Also, actors back then all came out of the theatre tradition. Almost nobody in Hollywood now comes out of the theatre tradition. There IS no theatre tradition! And it shows in the work of the actors and actresses up on the screen. I can’t really explain it, but I look at someone like Katherine Hepburn and I KNOW she has had theatre training.

The same is true for someone like Meryl Streep. Olympia Dukakis. Robert DeNiro. These people are obviously trained for the stage.

A funny story about Katherine Hepburn:

It was the 1930s. A new theatre group was being formed, a group who wanted to bring relevant plays to Broadway, plays which spoke to the angst of the time. In the 1930s, the majority of material on Broadway was fluffy high-brow comedies, the foibles of the upper-class. So, a “group” got together, headed by Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, and Cheryl Crawford, and they wanted to change all that.

The theatre which evolved out of that, the Group Theatre, only lasted a decade. But the Group is one of the most influential things to have ever happened in American theatre. Its influence cannot be over-stated. First of all, the Group Theatre gave us Clifford Odets’ plays. The Group Theatre was where Elia Kazan, who went on to direct the most influential and loved films of the 20th century, first got his training. Out of the Group Theatre eventually came the most influential acting teachers of the last century: Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Bobby Lewis, Morris Carnovsky …

The Group died because of in-fighting, and financial problems. Out of the ashes of the Group Theatre the Actors Studio was created by Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan, and obviously: the Actors Studio is directly responsible (in my view) for the elevation of film acting to an actual art form. The technique taught there created the kind of film acting which we all now take for granted. Marlon Brando, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Geraldine Page, Ellen Burstyn, James Dean, Montgomery Clift … all of these people came out of the Actors Studio.

But back to the Group Theatre: they were a bunch of successful people, in the middle of the Depression, who started holding meetings about how to revive the theatre, how to work as an ensemble, how to model themselves after the Moscow Art Theatre, how to be a group in a capitalist society which did not support such endeavors. Harold Clurman invited the big-wigs of the New York theatre scene to come join them, to come sit in on the meetings, to see if they would want to be a part of such an exciting and new project.

Katherine Hepburn, a 20-something Broadway actress at the time, not yet world-famous, “Philadelphia Story” still in her future, was invited to come to some of these meetings. She came. She sat. She listened. In the middle of the meeting, this young unknown actress got up and started to walk out. Harold Clurman stopped her. “Where are you going? What’s going on?”

Hepburn replied, “This is all very well for you people. But I’m going to be a star, you see.”

The purist Group people were horrified at this. But who has the last laugh now?