I am an old movie fanatic, but it’s hard for me to choke down a Katharine Hepburn movie. I’d rather watch Mickey Rooney over her, and that says a lot.
Beloved star. Award winning actress. First rate bitch.
I know all actors and actresses won’t always be pleasant to each other, such as Miriam Hopkins and Bette Davis or maybe June Haver and Betty Grable, but they had reasons. Hopkins slept with Davis’s husband and Haver was acting like she was the new Grable. Hepburn was rude to actors without any justification.
Hepburn and Mitchum in "Undercurrent" (1946)
Hepburn stars with Robert Taylor and newcomer (at the time) Robert Mitchum in 1946 thriller “Undercurrent.” To be honest, she probably was miscast because she is supposed to play the demure wife of Robert Taylor who is trying to kill her.
The snobbish Hepburn and gruff Mitchum did not get along. At one point during filming she said to him, “You know you can’t act, and if you hadn’t been good-looking you would never have got a picture at all. I’m tired of working with people like you who have nothing to offer.” (from IMDB trivia for the film).
The one thing I found ironic about this quote was the fact that it seems she got along fine with Robert Taylor who was famous for his good looks and capitalized off of them, according to Turner Classic Movies primetime host Robert Osborne.
The list goes on of actors that she was unpleasant to, including Ginger Rogers, who admired the actress, and John Barrymore who acted with her in her first film, “A Bill of Divorcement” (1932).
Hepburn and Rogers in "Stage Door" (1937)
“Astaire gave her class, Rogers gave him sex,” Hepburn said about the famous dancing pair.
“She is snippy, you know, which is a shame,” Ginger Rogers said about working with Hepburn in “Stage Door.” “She was never on my side.”.
Actresses like Joan Crawford and June Allyson answered every fan letter they received personally, something Katharine Hepburn didn’t do; she didn’t even sign autographs.
Crawford and Allyson understood that they achieved fame because of their fans. Not according to Miss Hepburn.
“Once a crowd chased me for an autograph ‘Beat it,’ I said, ‘Go sit on a tack!’ ‘We made you,’ they said. ‘Like hell you did,’ I told them.”
If Miss Hepburn didn’t give a damn about her fans, then why the hell should I care about her movies? After all, she was named “Box Office Poison” in 1938.
P.S.) As a side note, Audrey Hepburn and Katharine Hepburn are not related, to clear up confusion that some people seem to have.
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Worse, she gets a Hollywood stamp this year, only seven years after her death (the requirement used to be 10). It’s as if she jumped ahead in line of Carole Lombard (who was as likable as Hepburn was haughty), who deserves a stamp of her own.
I absolutely agree. While Miss Hepburn truly shines in some of her roles, in her interviews she really comes off as a very unpleasaent person.
Also, in my opinion, she fails in all roles that do not call for a strong, bold character. It’s a shame, really, because I have the feeling that she simply did not try hard enough to be a skillful actress.
I also just “love” the fact that she supposedly bought the rights to “The Philadelphia Story” all by herself, thus attaining freedom from the studio, when it was Howard Huges, her then-lover, who paid for that.
Hepburn couldn’t act in the least, not even to save her life, for that matter out of a wet paper bag with spurs and a machete. Why anyone holds the beyond hubris-ridden, imperious, self-inflated, self-serving sickly, disgusting, ruthless, vicious narcissist (who worked the casting couch to get “ahead” – no pun intended- for all it’s worth and then some and that’s a fact) as anything other than that in esteem, for that matter a vague actress has always escaped me.
Even as a child my sixth sense immediately told me she was a walking pox. And then some. And dear god……, her looks were right out of Halloween Central. Honestly, who was her father………, Leatherface? No doubt. That she was (an elitist) liberal also comes as no surprise.
The movie world would be v. well advised to bury this ruthless, talentless and vile bitch of bitches into oblivion.
I don’t mind Katharine, she is quite funny sometimes but god this made me laugh so much!
Seconded! She never did anything for me, but after reading about the feud between her and Ginger Rogers and that truly awful comment she made about Fred & Ginger, I absolutely cannot stand her! She stuck her nose up at most of Hollywood, but with the way she spoke of other actors and people in general, to me SHE was the one lacking any hint of class.