I am an old movie fanatic, but it’s hard for me to choke down a Katharine Hepburn movie. I’d rather watch Mickey Rooney over her, and that says a lot.
Beloved star. Award winning actress. First rate bitch.
I know all actors and actresses weren’t always be pleasant to each other, such as Miriam Hopkins and Bette Davis or maybe June Haver and Betty Grable, but they had reasons. Hopkins slept with Davis’s husband and Haver was acting like she was the new Grable. Hepburn was rude to actors without any justification.
Hepburn and Mitchum in “Undercurrent” (1946)
Hepburn stars with Robert Taylor and Robert Mitchum, a newcomer at the time, in 1946 thriller “Undercurrent.” To be honest, she probably was miscast because she is supposed to play the demure wife of Robert Taylor who is trying to kill her.
The snobbish Hepburn and gruff Mitchum did not get along. At one point during filming she said to him, “You know you can’t act, and if you hadn’t been good-looking you would never have got a picture at all. I’m tired of working with people like you who have nothing to offer.” (from IMDB trivia for the film).
The one thing I found ironic about this quote was the fact that it seems she got along fine with Robert Taylor who was famous for his good looks and capitalized off of them, according to Turner Classic Movies primetime host Robert Osborne.
The list goes on of actors that she was unpleasant to, including Ginger Rogers, who admired the actress, and John Barrymore who acted with her in her first film, “A Bill of Divorcement” (1932).
Hepburn and Rogers in “Stage Door” (1937)
“Astaire gave her class, Rogers gave him sex,” Hepburn said about the famous dancing pair.
“She is snippy, you know, which is a shame,” Ginger Rogers said about working with Hepburn in “Stage Door.” “She was never on my side.”.
Actresses like Joan Crawford and June Allyson answered every fan letter they received personally, something Katharine Hepburn didn’t do; she didn’t even sign autographs.
Crawford and Allyson understood that they achieved fame because of their fans. Not according to Miss Hepburn.
“Once a crowd chased me for an autograph ‘Beat it,’ I said, ‘Go sit on a tack!’ ‘We made you,’ they said. ‘Like hell you did,’ I told them.”
If Miss Hepburn didn’t give a damn about her fans, then why should I care about her movies? After all, she was named “Box Office Poison” in 1938.
P.S.) As a side note, Audrey Hepburn and Katharine Hepburn are not related, to clear up confusion that some people seem to have.
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