At eighty-five, and as captivating and spunky as ever, Hepburn appears as narrator of the documentary. Offering up home movies, personal photos and a look inside both her New York and Connecticut homes, Hepburn occasionally refers to herself in the third person, distinguishing the "real" Kate from her on screen persona, which she calls "the creature." It seems important to her to make the distinction. Katharine Hepburn: All About Me also features clips from all the great Hepburn movies from Bringing Up Baby (1938) to On Golden Pond (1981) and from lesser known pictures, like Spitfire (1934), which Kate herself seems just as happy to forget.
Born to freethinking parents, her father a doctor and her mother a women's rights advocate, Kate fondly recalls the years of her liberal Connecticut upbringing. She tells a funny story about being eleven and the only girl in a house of three brothers, where she cut off all her hair and began calling herself "Jimmy." Some might see it as a sign of things to come - the actress's refusal to play a traditional woman's role in a man's world. Another anecdote has Kate putting on a neighborhood play to raise money to buy a Victrola for the Navajos and charging a scandalous 75 cents a ticket. The price outraged the other children's parents who withdrew them from the production, and Hepburn was left with just one co-star. Nonetheless, the show was a success and Kate and the Navajos got their Victrola. It was another scene that might become familiar with Hepburn - "no" never seemed to be an acceptable answer.
Kate continues with the stories once she reaches Hollywood, stopping long enough to provide glimpses of rare footage, like that of a young Hepburn in a college production at Bryn Mawr and to show outtakes from her 1932 screen test. Among the high points she hits: pointing out how director George Cukor introduced her to the screen in A Bill of Divorcement (1932) and made sure she got noticed; a discussion of John Ford where he got bored and left the set of Mary of Scotland (1936) and told Hepburn to direct the scene; her thoughts on meeting Cary Grant on Sylvia Scarlett (1935) and how she preferred him plumper as he was then to his more distinguished older self; and there's a quirky comment on Bringing Up Baby, explaining that she "sort of liked the leopard until it tried to bite he one day."
Hepburn also opens a window to her personal life, showing off her paintings and other artwork, including a bust she'd sculpted of Spencer Tracy. She points out the very spot on the MGM lot where she and Tracy met just prior to filming Woman of the Year (1942). And she discusses the years spent with Spencer Tracy right up to his death, just 16 days after they finished filming Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967). Hepburn says that she has never seen the movie - she just can't watch it.
It's amazing to think that Hepburn lived ten more years after Katharine Hepburn: All About Me was filmed. There must have been more stories to tell from those last years - because she truly had a remarkable life. According to Kate, it was a life lived by her family's motto, "listen to the song of life." And listen she did. Katharine Hepburn died June 29, 2003. She was 96.
Producer: David Heeley, Joan Kramer, Cynthia Mitchell
Director: David Heeley
Screenplay: David Heeley, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Kramer
Cinematography: Michael Barry
Film Editing: Scott P. Doniger
Music: Michael Whalen
Cast: Katharine Hepburn.
BW & C-70m. Closed captioning.
by Stephanie Thames
