Hepburn made the misfit into a star By Johanna Schneller Published July 4, 2003 Katharine Hepburn, who died last Sunday at age 96, was it for me, I-T. Weekday afternoons in front of the Million Dollar Movie, she was mine - my role model, my mentor, my substitute mother. It was the 1970s; my own (single) mother was at work. Through Kate's on-screen careers, I plotted the ways I would be, too - glamorous lawyer, glamorous journalist, gritty frontier woman, queen. Because I mostly watched her films alone, and because she was so prickly in them, I was convinced for years that Hepburn spoke only to me. Like me, her characters were big-mouthed, fractious, possessed of more emotions than outlets for them. As a teenager, I was briefly surprised to discover that everyone felt this passionately about her; that she belonged to all. On the Million Dollar Movie, actresses came in three flavours: There were the villains, the Bette Davis/Joan Crawford bad girls. There were the second bananas, such as Eve Arden. And there were the goddesses, led always by the other glorious Hepburn, Audrey. Each of these types was allotted one thing to do well: plot wickedly, wisecrack snappily, or glow. Kate, miraculously to me, did all three. She insisted on it. Audrey was the Hepburn you loved automatically. You simply could not help it; she was charm incarnate. She was an angel who lightly touched down on earth so that mortals could have something to aspire to - or at least, feel briefly better for having gazed upon her face. You never doubted that Audrey would find love. The impediments to her happily-ever-after were always heady - oh dear, my boyfriend Cary Grant is a jewel thief! - and, at just the right moment, airily swept aside, insubstantial as fairy dust. Katharine Hepburn, however, came with no such guarantees. You could never relax and be sure that her characters would find love - or more importantly, keep it. She was too willful, too demanding. She blundered and blurted, made mistakes and resented apologizing for them. In her films, the impediments that kept her from love did not come from the plot, they came from within her character's brain, from her own contradictory self. The fact that she also looked every inch the goddess only made her more compelling. Blessed with a perfect face - those cheekbones! that jaw! - figure and diction, she still railed and fidgeted, had her heart stomped on, carried a homemade corsage of humble violets to the party. Of course they wilted, of course the other girls made fun of her - or worse, pitied her. Katharine Hepburn was a misfit, albeit an idealized one, who spoke and suffered and blazed for misfits everywhere. Her off-screen independence is well documented: She wore pants, slept with married men, lived alone (she said that men and women should keep separate houses and visit one another occasionally), befriended screenwriters and bullied them into writing scripts for her. She kept her private life private. She hated compromise. As a result, she is indisputably the star of her films, even when cast opposite an equally famous co-star. She is never just the girlfriend or wife; she is an evenly matched sparring partner. "Yes, you are bigger than me," she tells John Wayne in Rooster Cogburn, "but physically, only." Yes, her characters had to eat their share of humble pie: The woman of the year had to be a disaster in the kitchen, the society girl had to be brought down a peg. But I knew those were temporary concessions. Not long after the film ended, the sparring would recommence. Actress Lisa Kudrow (Friends, Romy and Michele's High School Reunion) is a fellow Kate-ite. To her, the ultimate Katharine movie is The Philadelphia Story, "because it's so confusing. I don't know what I'm supposed to think or who I'm supposed to root for," Kudrow told me. "The father is away with his mistress, his wife doesn't discuss it. It falls to the daughter [Hepburn] to address it - and somehow she's the spoiled, selfish one! Her father's complaint is, 'As a man gets older, he likes to look into a young woman's eyes, to remember that youth is still his. Usually a man gets that kind of solace from his daughter.' But his daughter is difficult, so he gets to have a mistress? What the hell kind of argument is that?" As for Cary Grant's character, Kudrow continues, "he was a drunk! He had a drinking problem! But she's a bitch because she wouldn't stand by him?" And yet, she is the hero of the film. Only Kate could pull that off. To quickly grasp Hepburn's dominion, her total role model domination, do this: Think about which current actress could replace her. Goldie Hawn took charge of her career early on, too, but Hawn is no Hepburn. Jessica Lange plays complicated characters and keeps her private life private, but she doesn't inspire reverence. Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz are perpetual girls, while Hepburn was always a lady. The closest comparison I can come up with is Susan Sarandon - but she's smug, which Kate never was. I hold out hopes for Reese Witherspoon, but the minute I say that, I see how far she has to go. About her tremendous influence, Hepburn always demurred. "I just had good timing," she told NBC. "The times fit me: Pants came in, low heels came in, the terrible woman came in, who spoke her mind." As usual, she was too modest. Katharine Hepburn made the times fit her, today as much as ever. Thank God for video, where she will outlive us all.