Today is Katharine Hepburn’s day on TCM and I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss something I’ve always found to be one of her greatest strengths: Finding chemistry with just about anyone. It’s not an easy thing to do in and of itself but she took it one step further: She had chemistry with Spencer Tracy, the man she loved. Do you know how many real life Hollywood couples have absolutely no chemistry on the screen? Almost all of them. But Hepburn? She could make every co-star, lover or not, look like they’d worked with her for the last thirty years.
Katharine Hepburn’s first great acting partner was Cary Grant. From Sylvia Scarlett in 1935 to The Philadelphia Story in 1940, Hepburn and Grant made four movies together in those five years, the most memorable, or at least the most popular, being Bringing Up Baby in 1938. My personal favorite is the other one I haven’t yet mentioned, Holiday, but the point is, for all of them, she and Cary worked together, from the start, as if they’d worked together for years. They had a natural rapport about them and, it’s true, Cary Grant had a natural rapport with everybody so it’s not exactly a stretch that the two of them would work well together but, still, Grant never worked with anyone better, consistently, as he did with Hepburn. The two had quite different styles and maybe that’s a part of what made the pair work. Hepburn always seems a powerful, striking presence onscreen while Grant always seems a natural, sophisticated presence. Those two qualities match up pretty evenly on the big screen which probably also helps account for some of Hepburn’s other great partners, including the big one, Spencer Tracy.
Spencer Tracy had that same natural, cool presence on the screen. It wasn’t sophisticated like Grant but it definitely was restrained. When he first matched up with Hepburn in Woman of the Year they fell in love on and off the screen. It’s a great performance by Hepburn and, again, as with Cary Grant, the first time you see she and Tracy together on the screen, it’s like they’d been at it for years. To the credit of both of them, they didn’t rest on what was immediately successful in their first big success and simply duplicate it repeatedly. They went in a few different directions and some of their pairings, like The Sea of Grass, aren’t as well known as some of the others but demonstrate their talents at working together nonetheless.
One of my favorite Hepburn/Tracy movies that isn’t as popular is Keeper of the Flame. It had a troublesome production, release, and reception, with even the director, George Cukor, giving it a thumbs down but I like it a lot and its reception these days is a lot more positive. But mainly, I bring it up because Hepburn and Tracy were trying to go in a completely different direction together after Woman of the Year and I think they succeeded. True, it was their comedies that really hit the mark but their dramatic work together is not to be written off.
Now think of all the actors that Hepburn worked with but once that felt as natural as if they’d been a longtime film couple. Many people still think her best pairing ever had nothing to do with Spencer or Cary but some guy named Humphrey instead. Bogart, that is. In The African Queen, Hepburn and Bogart play off of each other as well as two actors have ever done in the movies and it’s the kind of work that makes you wonder why they didn’t do it sooner.
Or how about Hepburn and Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter? What a great pairing there! Even though Hepburn won her third Oscar for it, O’Toole missed out (just as Tracy had the year before when she won for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and he had the chance to win posthumously but didn’t). It’s a shame because O’Toole is so fantastically good in the role I still get a little agitated thinking about the actual win (no, I won’t even mention it). Nonetheless, he and Hepburn work together marvelously, and this time it’s not because her partner was the laid back type because Peter O’Toole was anything but. This time it was Hepburn looking like the subdued, natural one. Quite a turn of events.
Finally, the only time she and her screen partner both won Oscars for their roles was when she and Henry Fonda both took home top acting honors for On Golden Pond. Yes, I know, it’s a sappy, stage-bound, filmed play that plays pretty flat but I think Hepburn and Fonda worked together so well that, like Bogart, you wondered why they’d never done it before.
There were other great pairings too, like her role in Rooster Cogburn with John Wayne, an actor who always seemed at home on the screen with any costar, much like Hepburn. And there were times when pairings didn’t necessarily work, too, but not often. One that comes to mind is The Rainmaker, a film in which both Hepburn and Burt Lancaster give very good performances but, and maybe this is just the nature of the story, don’t ever seem to really connect. Well, as Billy Bob Thornton once said, they can’t all be winners. Most of them, however, are and today is a good day to discover that, if you haven’t already. Katharine Hepburn was a great talent all by herself but she also made everyone around her better, and made herself better in the process.