Excerpt from Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies
Sidney Lumet on working with Katharine Hepburn and stars in general:
Because they are often the reason that a picture gets financed, actors tend to get spoiled. I hate those large trailers. I’ve seen trailers that are literally converted buses … All of this is dangerous in two ways: it costs a lot of money that doesn’t wind up on the screen; and even without meaning to, the stars begin to get a sense of power that can hurt their work.
Hepburn would never stoop to that level. She had, however, been a dominant factor in her own career. This was during her time at Metro, in the 30s and 40s. Most stars were in abject fear of Louis B. Mayer, but not Kate. She somehow created her own material. I don’t know if she commissioned Philip Barry to write The Philadelphia Story for her, but she owned the rights.
When we first met, on Long Day’s Journey, she was living in John Barrymore’s former house in Los Angeles. I stepped through the doors of what seemed to me a fifty-foot living room. She stood at the opposite end of the room and started toward me. We’d covered about half the distance when she said, “When do you want to start rehearsal?” (No “Hello” or “How do you do?”) “September nineteenth,” I said. “I can’t start till the 26th,” she said. “Why?” I asked. “Because then,” she said, “you’d know more about the script than I would.”
Funny, charming, but she meant it. It was perfectly all right with me if she knew more about the character. After all, she was going to play it, and I had a lot of other things to think about. But the challenge was unmistakable, and I could see trouble down the road.
The solution was to leave her alone. Though she had played great roles, nothing could compare with Mary Tyrone for psychological complexity, physical and emotional demand, and tragic dimension.
During the first three days of rehearsal I said nothing to her about Mary Tyrone’s character. I talked at length with Jason [Robards], who’d played his part before, with Ralph [Richardson] and Dean [Stockwell], and of course we talked about the play.
When we finished the run-through reading on the third day, there was a long pause. And then, from Kate’s corner of the table, a small voice called out, “Help!”
From then on, the work was thrilling. She asked, she told, she fretted, she tried, she failed, she won. She built that character stone by stone.
Something was still tight about the performance until the end of the second week. There’s a moment in the script when her youngest son, trying to cut through her morphine haze, screams at her that he’s dying of consumption. I said, “Kate, I’d like you to haul off and smack him as hard as you can.” She started to say that she couldn’t do that, but the sentence died halfway out of her mouth. She thought about it for 30 seconds, then said, “Let’s try it.” She hit him. She looked at Dean’s horrified face, and her shoulders started to shake. She dissolved into the broken, frightened failure that was so important an aspect of Mary Tyrone. The sight of that giant Hepburn in such a state was the personification of tragic acting.
When the Greeks said tragedy is for royalty, they were only saying that tragedy was for giants.
There was no tightness ever again. Kate was soaring.
