Spotlight on: Katharine Hepburn

“I never realised until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.” This single infamous line sums up for me, one of the many things I love about Katharine Hepburn as an actress. For she was anything but your stereotypical ‘broad’, which her boyish frame and distinctive Connecticut drawl.

Her father was a doctor and her mother was an early feminist who campaigned for women’s suffrage and birth control. But it was her no-nonsense attitude that made her one of those rare actresses in Hollywood who could give as good as she got, both in front of and behind the cameras. She spent her entire life doing things her way, despite what the film industry at the time thought to the contrary.

As a performer she was more than capable of holding her own against such acting heavyweights as Laurence Olivier, Cary Grant and John Wayne and as a product of the Golden Age of cinema her career spanned almost six-decades until she died in June 2003. Aside from her life-long affair with a married Spencer Tracy, Hepburn is perhaps best known for her Oscar-nominated turn in The _African Queen_ (1951) alongside Humphrey Bogart. Directed by John Huston and shot on locations throughout the Congo and Uganda, it became one of the first films to employ the use of Technicolor. Hepburn played the role of Rose Sayer, a missionary living out in German East Africa, who after the death of her brother, agrees to take a trip with Bogart’s steamboat captain Charlie Allnut down river. On discovering that war has just broken out in Europe, she manages to convince him to mount an attack on a German warship and the two soon strike up an unlikely romance. It is surely this spark between Hepburn and Bogart that makes the film.

However, whilst _The African Queen_ and the earlier screw-ball comedy, _Bringing Up Baby _are both undoubtedly Hollywood classics, it was in her role as Tracy Lord in _The Philadelphia Story_ (1940) that I was first introduced to a wise-cracking Hepburn, battling it out once again alongside Cary Grant and a rather young-looking Jimmy Stewart. This role as a newly engaged, recently divorced socialite was perfect for her and yet she came close to losing out on the part, despite having already acted the role in the theatre production of the play. After a string of flops, all the major Hollywood studios were unwilling to cast Hepburn in the film role and it was only when Howard Hughes bought the movie rights for her on the condition that Hepburn took the lead, that she was eventually guaranteed the role.

For me, _The Philadelphia Story_ is not just a clever romantic comedy; it’s also a film about class in all senses of the word. Without that, the film would have simply been one more in a long line of your typical Hollywood romantic comedies. One of my favourite scenes in the movie comes when Tracy Lord attempts to drunkenly slur her way through the lyrics to ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, to Jimmy Stewarts character Macaulay Connor, a reporter attempting to get an exclusive story on her up-coming wedding to a dull but aspiring politician. Equally as unforgettable is the scene that occurs shortly afterwards when a heavily inebriated Stewart goes to visit Cary Grants, C. K. Dexter Haven, Tracy Lord’s former husband and famously hiccups his way through the entire scene, much to the amusement of Grant, as the hiccups were unscripted. It is Hepburn though who delivers perhaps the most memorable line in the film when she remarks that, “the time to make your mind up about people is never!” Even seventy-one years after it was first released, _The Philadelphia Story_ continues to outsmart many of the romantic comedies being made today.