CRITIQUES

"Audiences will come to see Miss Hepburn play rather than the play Miss Hepburn is in. And they will not be disappointed. I have rarely seen Miss Hepburn better even in the movies...her acting is now in the lambent heat of its Indian Summer. Even her stylizations have become style in the certainty of their execution, so her startled and amused gentility, her crisp, ineffably unanswerable way with a cliche - all are unforgettable. Admirers of acting in that grand mannerism, now so easily lost, should see this performance and etch it on their memories."

COMMENTARY TRACK

"I adored her, but she scared the pants off me most of the time. On a good day, though, I could stand up to her, which I think she respected. I believe I was fairly close to what a child or grandchild might have been to her. A gossip column in the Boston papers even suggested that we were having an affair. She was sixty-seven and I was twenty-two, but I thought that was quite an honour. She was always a fantasy figure to me. When we were rehearsing in New York, I would go to see her old films, like Alice Adams, Bringing Up Baby, or Holiday, at art houses around the city. As I watched her on the screen, I knew that if I'd been an eligible bachelor back in the thirties, I would have done anything to meet her. Then at work the next morning she was sixty-seven again, coping with Parkinson's, sometimes crotchety, and always unpredictable."