One of those who simply are

‘I don’t want to act with you ever again,’ Katharine Hepburn told John Barrymore after appearing with him in A Bill of Divorcement. ‘I didn’t know you had,’ came the smart rejoinder. Hollywood stars divide into those who do and those who are. The divine Kate, with her sawn-off cheekbones, narrow eyes and weird Yankee version of a Southern drawl — ‘Yow owuld foowul!’ she shouts at Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond — belongs firmly in the latter category. None of her performances, not even in The African Queen or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, involves overmuch histrionic ingenuity. The woman on the screen is all the more entertaining for doing her usual shtik as the feisty, crap-cutting amazon staking her claim on male territory.

An honorary boy was indeed Hepburn’s vision of herself during a girlhood spent trying to please her father, the granite-jawed disciplinarian whose bullying eventually drove her brother Thomas to suicide.