More on Kate.

"More than a movie star, Katharine Hepburn was the patron saint of the independent American female. Spirited, direct, in charge of her own fate, but not above falling head over heels in love, often scandalously. She was well-spoken, well-educated and very disciplined. She played tennis and ran before it was fashionable; for decades, she famously swam every day, often in the frigid ocean, and it showed." - Mary McNamara (with comments from Molly Haskell, David Ehrenstein and many others).

"She reminded us again and again that self is a gift not to be doubted or squandered or pawned for less than it's worth." - Verlyn Klinkenborg

"Possibly because she got to me so young, her effect is rather out of proportion with what any movie star should mean to anyone, but I am immensely grateful for it. The kind of woman she played, the kind of woman she was, is still the kind of woman I should like to be, and an incidental line of hers, from the aforementioned The Philadelphia Story, remains my lodestar every time I pick up a pen to write anything all: 'The time to make your mind up about people is never!' This line was written by Donald Ogden Stewart, but in its utterly humanist commitment to the peculiarity and beauty of individuals, it was 100% Hepburn." - Zadie Smith

"She made her first film in 1932, her final film in 1994, and embodied during all of that time one of the most distinctive of screen presences. She almost always played a lady - sometimes with grease on her face, as in The African Queen - and her characters were resolute, forthright, self-assured and unbending (but able to bend in moments of tenderness or hilarity). She played opposite the top leading men of her time, including Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, James Stewart and John Wayne, effortlessly upstaging all of them when required." - Roger Ebert.

"Crisp and strange, her line readings were always attuned to her own specially calibrated inner clock - no actor, either among her contemporaries or her heirs, would dare imitate it, simply because there's no way to pull it off. Her rhythms have always belonged solely to her, and it took audiences many years to fully adapt to them." - Stephanie Zacharek

"Hepburn, not Giorgio Armani, most helpfully advanced the cause of androgynous clothing for women." - Valli Herman-Cohen

"Kate and Spence rarely if ever made the columns. Somehow it was as if the Hollywood press corps responded to the dignity with which the couple conducted their lives and their relationship." - Charles Champlin

"Katharine Hepburn was the only great star of Hollywood's golden age to live into the 21st century, and that is somehow fitting. For not only was she arguably the best actress the studio system ever had, she was also, both on and off the screen, the most indomitable." - Kenneth Turan



Posted by dwhudson at July 1, 2003 7:23 AM