Celebrating Katharine Hepburn on the 20th anniversary of her passing

Susan King
·5 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

Katharine Hepburn’s film career endured an extraordinary six decades. A strong-willed feminist, she was  a role model for generations of women and  fashion icon who eschewed dresses for stylish wide-legged pants. She is still the only performer to receive four best actress Oscars. She stuck to her guns and never attended the Oscars when was nominated only showing up to give the Thalberg award to a producer with whom she worked with at MGM. Hepburn also made nine films with the great Spencer Tracy, though, their off-screen love affair may not have been exactly what it seemed.

It was the 20th anniversary of her death on June 29 at the age of 96. And over the years when I was on staff at the Los Angeles Times, I talked to several actors and directors who worked with her.

More from GoldDerby

Such as Anthony Quinn with whom I chatted in 1994 when he starred with Hepburn in her penultimate TV movie “This Can’t Be Love,” which also starred Jason Bateman.

Working with Hepburn was a dream come true for the two-time Oscar-winner. “I guess actors romanticize certain actresses. I’ve always looked for a Katie Hepburn in my life. I guess I always romanticized Katie.  I envied her relationship with Spencer Tracy. I envied it. She started acting in the movies in 1932 and I started in 1936. We ran the gamut together. We saw the movies come and we changed our style of acting and changed according to these times. She kept her presence and her style.”

And sense of humor. In one scene in “This Can’t Be Love,” Quinn arrives at Hepburn’s house. “The maid says she should be ready in a minute, and suddenly we see her come to the top of the stairs to make an entrance. [Director] Tony Harvey said, ‘just stand there.’ She is eighty-something years old and may have a problem sometimes, but she did this delightful little dance. He thought it didn’t fit in, but she wanted to have fun. It was wonderful to see.”

That same year, Henry Winkler worked with Hepburn in her in final film, the NBC movie “One Christmas.”’ He was thrilled but not intimidated working with the legend. “I was so happy that I wasn’t intimidated, that I wasn’t awkward, and I did my job. I was thrilled to death. I was proud of myself. She is an amazing person because she is 87. She is a very powerful woman. She is very powerful physically. We were in this big mansion on Market Street in Wilmington, N.C. and there was this big stairway going up to the second level where she had to do a scene. She climbed those stairs as if she was just walking from one chair to another. She has a very powerful presence and whatever time does a human being at 87, it didn’t matter,”’

He told me in 2007 that she did need cue cards for her lines. “We had several scenes together,” Winkler noted. “I would hold up her cue card in front of my face and then lower it to say my line and then bring it back up…. I wouldn’t have changed a moment of that experience.”

Hepburn made her TV movie debut in 1973 starring with Sam Waterston, Joanna Miles and Michael Moriarty in the acclaimed Emmy-winning adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” which aired on ABC. Miles, who won an Emmy for playing Laura opposite Hepburn’s Amanda recalled that the actress had strict rules on the set. “If a fellow was reading a newspaper up in the rafters, he got fired because she wanted people to really concentrate on what we were doing,” Miles told me in 2007.

Though there have been books such as William J. Mann’s “Kate The Woman Who Was Hepburn” that have offered revisionist viewers of her personal life and her relationship with Tracy, Miles maintained they were in love. Miles recalled visiting the actress when she was in Los Angeles at her Beverly Hills house she had shared with Tracy: “She had many, many cupboards filled with photos of him. She had his chair…she would talk about their life together.”

Hepburn also loved to challenge the authority of her directors and writers. Mark Rydell, who directed her to her fourth Oscar for 1981’s “On Golden Pond,” was one who was challenged. He had rented a firehouse on location in New Hampshire so the cast, which also included Henry and Jane Fonda, for rehearsals. But Hepburn wanted rehearsals held at the house she had rented.

“I thought, ‘this is her attempt to control things,’ but it seemed innocent enough, so we all met at her house,” Rydell noted in 2007. “She brought out cookies and there was a table that she had set up for everyone. She sat at the head of the table. I knew this was a significant moment, so I politely said ‘Katharine, I think you are in my seat.’ She  looked at me kind of astonished that I had the temerity to insist on being at the head of the tale. She got up and moved to the side and we conducted the rehearsal. Henry winked at me…”

PREDICTthe 2023 Emmy nominees by July 12

Make your predictions at Gold Derby now. Download our free and easy app for Apple/iPhone devices or Android (Google Play) to compete against legions of other fans plus our experts and editors for best prediction accuracy scores. See our latest prediction champs. Can you top our esteemed leaderboards next? Always remember to keep your predictions updated because they impact our latest racetrack odds, which terrify Hollywood chiefs and stars. Don’t miss the fun. Speak up and share your huffy opinions in our famous forums where 5,000 showbiz leaders lurk every day to track latest awards buzz. Everybody wants to know: What do you think? Who do you predict and why?

Best of GoldDerby

Sign up for Gold Derby's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.