LAUREN BACALL
"Time with her was more than time well spent. A little bit with her was worth days and weeks and months with somebody else."
HUMPHREY BOGART
"Hepburn has unassailability. She is a dyed in the wool eccentric. There is nothing phony about her. She is not beautiful, more like a nylon-covered skeleton. She's no chicken any more either, but she's really fascinating with a tremendous off-beat kind of sex appeal which throws out a challenge that not any hunk of man can take up. She's shy, though. At interviews she shakes like a leaf, although she has the guts not to show it. She's got maybe half a dozen friends in Hollywood and she just circulates among them. You never see her at the nightclubs. When you spend six weeks on a boat in the jungle with a woman and all around you are down with malaria you kind of get to know her. I got to know Katie like a favourite book." (London Daily Mirror, 1953)
GEORGE CUKOR
"She was never a 'love me, I'm a lovable little girl' kind of actress. She always challenged the audience, and that wasn't the fashion in those days. On the hoof, when people first saw her, they felt something arrogant in her playing. Later, by sheer feeling and skill, she bent them to her will. Of course, her quality of not asking for pity, not caring whether people liked her or not, was ideal for The Philadelphia Story. Barry wrote it for her." (interview with Gavin Lambert, 1970)
"She sounds formidable but she really isn't. She's hardworking and she's a darling good friend. But there's no time wasted there. And she's funny; as she gets older she gets more comic." (interview with Beverly Gray, 1980)
CARY GRANT
"As an actress, she's a joy to work with. She's in there trying every minute. There isn't anything passive about her; she 'gives.' And as a person, she's real. There's no pretense about her. She's the most completely honest woman I've ever met."
"She was this slip of a woman, skinny, and I never liked skinny women. But she had this thing, this air, you might call it, the most totally magnetic woman I'd ever seen, and probably have ever seen since. You had to look at her, you had to listen to her, there was no escaping her. But it wasn't just the beauty, it was the style. She's incredibly down to earth. She can see right through the nonsense in life. She cares, but about things that really matter."
ANTHONY HARVEY
"Katharine Hepburn is the most extraordinary person I've ever met in my life. And I must say if she became President of the United States we would all be at peace for the rest of our lives. She has tremendous integrity, a superb sense of humour, self-discipline, courage, generosity. And above all she is a great professional." (1969)
GARSON KANIN
"She makes dialogue sound better than it is by a matchless clarity and beauty of diction, and by a fineness of intelligence and sensibility that illuminates every shade of meaning in every line she speaks."
DAVID LEAN
"I like and admire her very much. Kate has more energy than anyone I know and we jabber away trying to get a word in edgeways with each other. Two larger than life egotists. Kate amazed me by saying she thought that monogamy and marriage as we know it is all wrong. (This is a reaction to all the guilts she used to carry around about her love affair with Spence.) As we agreed, if society suddenly changed and it was alright to have free love we wouldn't all be dancing into any more beds than we do at present. Even less perhaps. She is almost certain that if Spence and she had got married years ago they probably wouldn't be together now. We also (naturally) talked about our own particular ego-nut-cases. She was saying that it's almost impossible to hope that anyone, husband or wife, can understand what it's like when this creative thing takes hold and they find themselves suddenly pushed aside into fourth or fifth place. She also has a theory that if one really loves one doesn't lose that love....She makes me laugh like mad because she's part schoolgirl, part very logical man and part straight as they come woman. We have a very good relationship which I can only describe as brother and sister." (letter, April 15, 1963)
"Kate was wonderful. She had very definite ideas about people. A lot of people were scared of her. She was one of those electric personalities. I have never met anybody quite like Kate. You could put Charlie Laughton and Kate in a box - I don't suggest you do, God knows what would happen - but they were fascinating people, highly gifted, highly original."
GEORGE STEVENS
"Kate is the most inspiring person I ever met in my life. The figure she presented on screen was a concept. She developed this grace and beauty and moved in where Garbo tread heavily in the imagination of American audiences. Offering no mystique like Garbo had, but offering intelligence instead. It’s a strange thing for an actress to present intelligence and make it work, intelligence that had to do with beauty, grace, and just damned good thinking. She was Jimmy Dean-ing before Jimmy Dean ever thought of it, and she wore slacks, too. How she anticipated this era today I don’t know, but she did it wearing blue jeans and a sweater." (interview with Robert Hughes, 1967)
HAL WALLIS
"At the risk of hurting the feelings of many great ladies of the screen, I must say that of all the actresses I have worked with, Katharine Hepburn is my favourite for many reasons: her intelligence, talent, dignity, integrity, wit, and humour being just a few. There is no one quite like her. She is unique. Her delight in life is contagious. Sparks fly when Kate's around. Her enthusiasm and vitality recharge the batteries like the wallop of a good martini. The most down-to-earth legend I have ever met, she is laser sharp and incisive, tough as rawhide, yet as quick and sensitive as the wingbeat of a hummingbird. I admire and respect her honesty, her sense of privacy, her life-style. The lady's beauty is ageless because her spirit is young and always will be. No energy crisis here. A generation of would-be actresses have been inspired by her, as will generations to come. She is an untapped mine of inner resources: never feels sorry for herself; never complains; never lonely; never at a loss for living. There aren't enough hours in the day for her to do all she wants to do....She could have been a great doctor, faith healer, painter, or president. As far as I'm concerned, Katharine Hepburn's face ought to be carved into the rock of Mount Rushmore. But of course, she's already a national monument." (Starmaker: The Autobiography of Hal Wallis, 1980)
