Katharine Hepburn: All About Me

What a lovely 70 minutes of Katharine talking about her whole career from the early days all the way through 1993 when this was made! She reminisces about different movies and they show stills and sometimes a relevant clip of her amazing talent!

They need to do this type of loving career retrospective for more of the living Stars still among us!

This documentary gives an excellent overview of everything she did on-screen. It is a true star-actress with a great number of famous movies on her credit. I myself have a lot of pleasure looking to her movies with Spencer Tracy, but also love her playing as Ethel Thayer in "On golden Pond"

Having seen a bunch of these, I was prepared for the same sort of star turn, image-projecting, egotistically considered, carefully edited and sculpted, "make sure you show my best side" deal we've gotten used to. BUT... I guess I should have known better, and I certainly wasn't surprised, given the Character (with a capital C) of this remarkable person.

She may have known what she wanted to talk about in each segment, but she does (or appears to do) every one of them impromptu.

Her disquisition on her 27 years with Spencer Tracey would have been affecting on its own. But intercut as it was with his manifesto scene from "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" -- shot as it was in Tracey's final weeks of life -- her reaction to his commentary about =their= relationship (not just the one on screen) caused her eyes to widen and mouth to drop open. And the director of that film made sure it didn't wind up on the cutting table.

If you get a chance to see it on TCM, you may consider yourself as blessed as I do just now after having seen it.

We never saw this documentary when it came out. In a tribute to Katherine Hepburn, TCM showed it, as part of the daily festivity. Director David Heeley, who also co-wrote the material with Ms. Hepburn, clearly demonstrate an impeccable taste in what he carefully picked to show us.

Katherine Hepburn was a woman ahead of her times. She had a sense of self and her own style, something that came to her naturally. Ms. Hepburn was an actress who knew what seemed to suit her talent as we witness in all the movies she graced with her presence.

We are given clips from her films, as well as a tour of her Connecticut home and her surroundings. Also, in the documentary, we see some comments by her peers that speak volumes as to what extent she was admired by the people that came in contact with her. And, yes, she was opinionated, and didn't care to express her views, as she stuck by her principles.

Yes, it certainly was a privileged life.

Katharine Hepburn was one of those players who put her indefinable stamp on everything she ever did. As she points out even after becoming a personality she deliberately went after roles that stretched her talents. This was one woman not afraid of any of the challenges life brought her.

This is one fine documentary mixing some of Kate's home movies with her film roles and some other candid home movie and newsreel features from her long career. When this documentary came out in 1993 the candle was almost run down, but she had a few good things left in her.

Playing roles like Tracy Lord, or Linda Seton, even Pat Pemberton they were parts that were tailored to the Hepburn image. But as she said taking on Shakespeare, O'Neill, and Greek tragedies are proved parts that dare the player to do them as good as the many who came before. Katharine Hepburn did Shakespeare on stage so we have no record, but you can't tell me that when you watch O'Neill's Long Days Journey Into Night or The Trojan Women you can't see a bit of Kate in her performances.

Of course Spencer Tracy took up a great deal of the documentary. One of the great screen teams of all time, every one of their films, nine of them, rates being called a classic. And the respect that the film community had for both of them. They could never live as they did with today's tabloid press and the internet.

Katharine Hepburn one American original. We'll not see her like again.