I really love almost all of Katharine Hepburn’s movies, but I really don’t get the “greatest actress” thing. She only ever played one character (with disastrous exceptions; Dragon Seed, anyone?)–herself. I think she had a immense talent–one of the alltime immensest–for appearing utterly unselfconscious in front of the camera; she ALWAYS seemed perfectly natural in the character she was portraying. But she had exactly ZERO range, which I think is a huge criterion for being the best actress of all time.
Jo March in Little Women, Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, and Rose Thayer in The African Queen. What would those women have thought of the others?
All exactly the same character, externally. She had an uncanny ability to make her lines sound like natural, honest speech, and the lines that were written for those characters created three different people, but Hepburn did not confer any individuality on them. Her talent lay in being almost completely transparent as a vessel for the writer’s words, which is an immense talent. I can think of very few actors who even approach her on that count. But that’s not really acting; it’s almost the opposite, it seems to me.
You and Dorothy Parker: ‘She runs the gamut of emotion from A to B’
Thank you for both answers. I am one of those few that strongly disliked Streep’s throw-back over-acting. The reasons I don’t like Streep is the reason I don’t think Bette is so great. I will gladly concede she was far better at the almost-stage acting style than anyone else I can think of.
I think Katherine Hepburn’s natural style far exceeds the Davis/Streep style. I even prefer Audrey Hepburn’s even more natural style of acting to Davis and Streep. Of course here I am guilty of just loving watching her on screen and the acting skill is a bonus.
Now I will gladly admit that in most of Katherine’s movie’s with Spencer Tracy she (and he) basically played themselves and it worked as they were both better characters than almost any writer could create. However when Kate player Eleanor of Aquitaine she was Eleanor of Aquitaine and I never thought look at Hepburn playing opposite Peter O’Toole. I saw Eleanor and King Henry II.
Speaking of which, Peter O’Toole & Anthony Hopkins at least deserve a strong mention in this thread. They are two truly great actors.
I agree with **Walloon **that her portrayals in the films he listed were great acting.
An additional consideration in trying to identify the Greatest Actor and Actress is which style of acting they’re tied to. It has become trite to mention that Brando was The Turning Point between the declamatory stage-oriented style that had held sway before the 50’s and “The Method” that has been the norm since then.
If the actor in question can be convincing and impressive in both major categories or styles, it seems to me that that person’s greatness should exceed the ones stuck in one style. It’s almost comedy when one tries the other style and fails.
Brando was less effective in his Julius Caesar effort, as he was in Guys and Dolls with the foray into singing. But he didn’t fall flat on his face in the effort.
I find the Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Harvey and Laurence Olivier efforts at the Method equally off-putting. Hopkins least of the batch since his Hannibal Lecter is a tour-de-force.
Maybe the fact that Henry Fonda was like James Stewart in that he played Henry Fonda best, is what keeps him off my list of top contenders. I’m that way now about DeNiro and Pacino.
I regret omitting Sean Penn, and to a lesser degree Johnny Depp. But both of them seem too much of stylists than true actors. Nicholson is like that for me, too.
Eastwood has done some damn fine work, but he’s just playing Eastwood.
Just some additional stuff to think (and talk) about?
Others to consider:
Samuel Jackson
Don Cheadle
Denzel Washington
Forest Whitaker
Sidney Poitier
Morgan Freeman
Well, I won’t go that far. I think Hepburn was great at making the emotions of her character seem real and natural, all the way from A to Z; I just don’t think the gamut of her *character *range was much wider than A to B.
This could well be the key to the whole issue. For many reasons professional actors get offered roles “to type” or because their past performances may have been financial successes or because they themselves took a strong (financial) interest in the project. Bankability figures into their choices. Once the God Success has worked its way into their thought process it becomes progressively more difficult for them to accept “challenging” roles.
It oughtn’t be hard to identify the handful of successful actors who still go out of their way to avoid “type” or “playing the same role” when there are millions of dollars standing in the way of “perfecting their craft.”
That’s probably why when we finally settle on The Great Actor and The Great Actress we’re going to have to look to the group somewhat below the Star level and settle for the Character Actor type.
Yes. My main point being that I think Kate realized early on that if she strayed from her comfort zone (has anyone but me seen Dragon Seed? Essential viewing: Katharine Hepburn with eyelids that look they were sculpted out of putty, a la Raiders of the Lost Ark, speaking clumsily accented screen pidgin), she was in trouble. This is not to say she couldn’t have developed a wider range over time; it just seems likely to me that she decided early on not to.
I never saw or heard of that one. I see it has only a handful of votes on IMDB. It looks like a mostly forgotten movie. Was the movie actually worth watching or just academically to see a poor job by Hepburn?
However, It will be on TCM “Mon. Feb. 23 6:45 AM”.
It’s pretty entertaining, but admittedly much of its entertainment value is in seeing Hepburn, Walter Huston, Aline McMahon, and Agnes “Endora” Moorehead in bad Asian makeup and dropping all their articles and pronouns.
Sounds a little painful. I don’t think I’ll bother to record it. I only watched “The Good Earth” very recently and that was a bit tough for me to sit through and that was a “Great Movie” from a Pearl S. Buck story. By the way: Mon. Feb. 23 9:15 AM TCM for “The Good Earth”.
Ed Norton always commands my attention when he is on screen. Walter Brennan too. Always good.
Maureen O’Hara, Vanessa Redgrave.
Others have already been mentioned.