Star Profile

Katharine Hepburn – the American queen
Katharine Hepburn, playing Susan, has lost her pet leopard, Baby, in the woods of suburban Connecticut.

She inveigles Cary Grant, playing a hapless palaeontologist named David, who is in search of his bone, into helping her hunt for it.
Temporarily stymied, Susan says: “Let’s think.” Exasperated, David retorts: “Oh, you think, you can think faster than I can.” Susan responds, with simple pleasure: “Thank you, David.”
Near the end of Bringing Up Baby, it’s the first compliment he’s paid her – and Katharine Hepburn, who was born a century ago, on May 12 1907, knew a compliment when she heard one. Try to imagine a romantic comedy today allowing that the woman thinks faster than the man – or that her quick-wittedness will help him find his bone, rather than taking it away (the smutty joke is the film’s, not mine).
The “heroines” in our rom-coms are not bright, spiky, acerbic: they are neurotic, desperate, usually inarticulate and sometimes comatose.
It’s tempting to ask whatever happened to women like Katharine Hepburn, but of course there were never many women like Hepburn.
She was what the 18th century would have called an Incomparable.
In the course of her long and renowned career, she played women from Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (The Lion in Winter) to a transvestite (Sylvia Scarlett), but she never played a woman who was stupid, whingeing or needy. Hepburn’s beauty was staggering, but her brains were pretty impressive, too.
Hepburn’s classic films offer not only escapism, but also aspiration; an idea of what a woman might be.
She and the other stars of Hollywood’s golden age were not saints or world leaders, but they were as sharp and scintillating as they were soignees. They were not ahead of their time – we are lagging behind.
It was Cary Grant, after all, who invented the metrosexual. And Hepburn – along with Carole Lombard and Bette Davis – proved that a sovereign, proud and fiercely intelligent woman could dazzle the world. And outwit it.
The daughter and niece of feminist pioneers, raised in flinty New England, Hepburn was taught self-reliance from a young age.
When she was declared “box-office poison” after a string of commercial failures, Hepburn returned to Broadway, where her friend Philip Barry wrote a play for her, The Philadelphia Story.
According to one biography, Hepburn collaborated with Barry on the development of her character, making shrewd decisions in the interest of damage control: “Make her like me,” she reportedly told Barry, “but make her go all soft in the end.”
That’s exactly what he did, and the play was a huge hit. The film has become a classic, and still sets a peerless standard for romantic comedy.
Playing Eleanor of Aquitaine at the age of 61, Hepburn threatens to peel her husband like a pear, and contemplates hanging her necklace from her nipples, but forbears because “it would shock the children”.
Compare Hepburn’s ageing monarch with Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep, who are playing roles in which they are the butt of sexist and regressive jokes about evil mothers-in-law and female bosses.
When Hepburn plays a female boss, in Desk Set, she outsmarts a computer. She’s still showing us how it’s done. Today’s female stars can teach us how to be cute; Katharine Hepburn taught us how to be magnificent.