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Katharine Hepburn: Love Affair
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Katharine Hepburn's genealogy has been researched through the Whittier line back to King Louis IX of France. She is listed as one of the descendants of the Mayflower compact author William Brewster (her family tree). Her paternal grandfather, Sewell Hepburn, was an Episcopal clergyman, but on the subject of religion, she told another member of the journalism community she loved so much to shock (this time a Ladies Home Journal reporter) in October 1991, "I'm an atheist and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people."[4]
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[T]he controlled, manicured rawness of Hepburn's performance is the key to "Alice Adams." Striving to impress MacMurray, she natters enthusiastically and much too brightly; too desperate to simply be herself, she adopts the kinds of airs that she believes characterize rich people. Her pretense is a kind of mania that electrifies her from within. And yet, even wired with all that falseness, Hepburn's Alice is more real, and far more alive, than the cool, stuffed-bird rich girl MacMurray is supposed to be interested in. Just three years into her movie career -- she had begun on the stage, and would return there now and then throughout her career -- Hepburn knew how to give a performance that was both sociologically savvy in its understanding of the ways we all yearn for things we can't have (a theme that would have had even more resonance during the Depression) and in its piercing humanity (we like to think of humanity as warm, but it's just as often sharp). Hepburn's Alice is a performance that's both hard to like and impossible not to fall in love with.
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After Pat and Mike, Hepburn's career was largely a matter of fine performances in mediocre films. In Summer Madness (1955), she plays a repressed spinster who finds love with Rossano Brazzi in Venice; in The Rainmaker (1956) she plays Lizzie, another unhappy, small-town spinster who meets Starbuck (Burt Lancaster). In his biography of Hepburn, Kate, Charles Higham wrote that Starbuck's:
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Hepburn's other films from the 1940s are a mixed bag. Dragon Seed (Harold S. Bucquet and Jack Conway, 1944) is a sort of Pearl Buck re-tread with Hepburn miscast as a Chinese freedom fighter. Undercurrent (Vincente Minnelli, 1946) is a thriller that shows some promise, featuring Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum, but Hepburn seems a bit unsure of herself in the film noir genre, and Minnelli's direction is tentative. In Song of Love (Clarence Brown, 1947), Hepburn gets to play Clara Schumann, a chance she must have jumped at. The film, with Paul Henreid as Schumann and Robert Walker (!) as Brahms, falls victim to the usual clichés of the Hollywood artist biopic, but the style and production values are rather good, and Hepburn keeps the movie from sinking.
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On the screen, meanwhile, Hepburn had made an appalling comedy, The Iron Petticoat (1956), with Bob Hope. Nor was The Rainmaker (1956), in which she was a confirmed spinster who discovers love at the last gasp through the good offices of Burt Lancaster, up to much.
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Love Affair