There was truth in every little thing she did

That is why millions today, who never knew her, will feel diminished in her absence. She brooked no nonsense, suffered no fools, and was always dignified and would do things her way, which she knew to be the right way. Her father was a surgeon, her mother a suffragette and crusader. In that household, in Hartford, everybody had opinions and duties and was instructed in the value of hard work and forthrightness.

She went to Bryn Mawr College and got into professional theatre through a letter of introduction to a roadshow producer in Baltimore. Once there, she never stopped, unless she was (A) fired (it happened in the early days, because she insisted on expressing herself) or (B) grew disgusted, or (C) took time off to help Spencer Tracy die, a five-year ordeal from which she never flinched and about which she never complained, another example of character in the ego-freak hothouse of Hollywood star vanity.

She wasn’t interested in films, considering them vulgar after the higher artistic concerns of the Broadway stage, where, after some travail, she’d become a star by 1932. When RKO offered her a contract, she amused herself by demanding the most absurd salary she could think of. That would drive them away. Instead it drove them to her. What the camera saw, the camera loved. She was all angles and planes, like a geometry problem with freckles and a thatch of reddish hair. She looked fabulous from every vantage point, and her eyes beamed with intelligence. She expressed what she was: a high-bred woman of imperious self-confidence, crisp, determined, almost remorseless.

Yet she was so adorable: Men didn’t want to have sex with her, they wanted to hang out with her. If she lacked the curvy figure of the screen sex goddess, she had fabulous legs, broad, square shoulders and a greyhound’s predatory stride. She had that thing that commands: Only the strongest of male stars could stand up to it, and when she found someone her equal, the results were almost always delicious magic.

Her first film, A Bill of Divorcement (1932), was a hit, and she had another, the next year, in Little Women. Hollywood quickly typecast her as the standoffish Eastern Seven Sisters grad: There was nothing vulgar or wanton about her; she stood for class and conservative values and could play queens but never courtesans, teachers but never chorines, aviatrixes but never stewardesses. Behind the scenes, she didn’t seem to be having much fun. She had quickly married a Philadelphia socialite, then divorced him, and kept her social life secret. She wore pants in public and wouldn’t do interviews with fan magazines in the ’30s.

A return to Broadway was a disaster, but later in the decade she boldly foreshadowed the style of today’s star-producers by seizing control of the means of production. She acquired the film rights to Philip Barry’s play The Philadelphia Story, which she played on Broadway, then returned to LA in control of that property. She teamed up with Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. The film was a hit in 1940, two years after she starred with Grant in the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby.

As she grew older, we realised that where she really shined was in tandem. The most famous, of these, was Spencer Tracy, with whom she made nine movies. Her high-strung passion, his common-man slow burn. His obdurateness, her intensity. His lumpy beauty, her refined, almost stylised looks. His Milwaukee accent, her refined Eastern nasal reediness. Not all movies were great: Sea of Grass, for example, is a western potboiler, and the climax to the cycle, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is wooden if earnest. But when they were battling for the championship of the boy-girl intramural league in such films as Pat and Mike, Woman of the Year, Adam’s Rib and Desk Set, magic truly happened.

It probably helped that they were in love. During his lifetime, this was never spoken of, but the two of them enjoyed an intimate friendship of over 25 years. Possibly they found freedom in the fact that they could never marry, because his Catholic faith forbade divorce.

She was stunningly brilliant at least three times without Tracy in the ’50s: In The African Queen, she bonded with a boozy Humphrey Bogart. In Summertime, directed by David Lean in 1955, she’s a spinster on vacation in Venice, where she meets a stranger (Rossano Brazzi). Her fear of commitment, mistrust of her emotion, awkwardness at a man’s touch — brilliantly evoked.

Finally, the crackpot Tennessee Williams looney tune of all time, Suddenly Last Summer. This one is nutcake city, in which every performer — Liz Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Mercedes McCambridge — is coached to go for broke by director Joseph Mankiewicz. But it’s Hepburn, who descends in an iron cage in her wheelchair like a dark angel of God, who dominates. Well, except in the scene with Taylor in her white bathing suit, but that’s a different story.

As late as 1981, she got her fourth Oscar for On Golden Pond. Again, the material is far from great, a transparent weeper meant to showcase old stars, but Hepburn, joined with Henry Fonda, worked magic.

In later years, she would appear on talk shows in an old sweater and pants, her voice and hands trembling with palsy, but eyes sharp as lasers and her opinions as forthright and vivid. She was still Our Kate, to the very end. She’ll always be Our Kate. (LAT-WP)