In praise of Katharine Hepburn

"If you lead a public life, people are much more on to you than you think."

-Katharine Hepburn


I watched again Katharine Hepburn: All About Me (1993) on TCM the other day, and it's always a great time. It's a very well-made and entertaining autobiography, with brackets here and there to show us how she lived at the time the documentary was made. It's a flattering autobiography, make no mistake, but successfully complimenting yourself is much harder than you think. I carefully avoid reading autobiographies, because you know there's going to be a lot of kiss and telling, and washing of dirty laundry, and settling of old scores, that will make you despise everything about that movie star and what he/she used to represent to you.

She pokes a lot of gentle fun at herself, but as far as I could tell, there's never a single moment when she criticizes other people. And she met quite a few well-known monsters in her day (Louis Mayer, anyone?) Even when she mentions Howard Hughes, a notoriously difficult man whom she dated, it's only to thank him for having bought the script for Philadelphia Story, the movie that would get her career back on track. She mentions her husband, whom she was married to for four years, but only to speak of him with tenderness and gratitude, and putting the blame for their divorce squarely on her shoulders -- saying she was too selfish and too self-centered, and that later on, when time had improved her character, she was finally able to thank him. This too is a way to compliment herself, and to draw our attention away from perhaps more serious flaws -- but she does it so elegantly, with such generosity towards other people's flaws, that you really feel she's earned it.

At her worst, she comes off as someone who is a kind of less overbearing Barbra Streisand, in her bossiness and domineering, outspoken attitude -- but let us join hands and agree never to say "I love a woman who speaks her mind", shall we? Seeing as stupid women also speak their minds, with less interesting results.

Watching a clip of On Golden Pond (1981), where she co-starred with Henry Fonda in his last role, I was reminded of how terrible that movie is, and what a truly great plastic surgery she had. He plays a man you simply can not like. There's a scene where she's being so sweet to him, calling him her knight in shining armour, and, true to form, he replies "I don't like horses". I wish I could push him in the lake. But they make this scene almost palatable, because he gives him a bit more warmth, so that he's not such an ass-hole, and she takes it in stride, so that her character doesn't come off as such a fool.

It striked me for the first time what a lesson in good acting this is: as long as the director lets you, you can "re-write" the script with your body language, making the character express what he should be saying all along. You can correct the worst of scripts by introducing a sub-text with your acting. Hopefully, people will pay more attention to you than to the story, and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of actors have saved a movie this way.