“I don’t want to be anyone else”: the actors Katharine Hepburn compared to baked potatoes
As one of the most esteemed and iconic performers in Hollywood history, Katharine Hepburn was entitled to say whatever she wanted about whoever she saw fit, with two actors earning comparisons to a carb-loaded staple of diets the world over as a result.
It might come across as disparaging to have a record-setting star who snagged an unmatched four Academy Awards for ‘Best Actress’, earned another eight nominations, took home a pair of Baftas, but strangely never won a Golden Globe lump them in with a delicious and fluffy tattie, but that wasn’t quite the case.
Beyond her on-screen exploits, Hepburn became a trendsetter and fashionista who went against the societal grain, most famously by wearing trousers. Through a modern lens, a woman opting for dual-legged attire is hardly going to cause outrage, but it was radical at the time and almost single-handedly caused sales to skyrocket among the female population.
Throw in a litany of classics covering multiple genres, from the rom-com The Philadelphia Story to the moving drama On Golden Pond, the epic adventure of The African Queen to the socially conscious comedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and if she wanted to call somebody a potato, they were left with no other choice but to smile and nod.
Despite a legendary career that few in cinema history can ever hold a candle to, Hepburn wasn’t above involving herself in that highly specific conversation, either. In fact, she once invoked the good name of the baked potato by describing both the foodstuff and herself as “fundamental, basic, nothing fancy, rough in a way”.
The most famous creative partnership of her career came alongside Spencer Tracy, with the dynamic duo appearing in nine films together between 1942 and 1967. Did that automatically make him immune from being mentioned in the same breath as a spud? No, no it did not.
“Spencer Tracy and Laurette Taylor, my favourite actors, were like baked potatoes,” she said, per Observer. “One look at them, and you just knew they’d taste as good as they looked. Me, I’m more like the Flatiron Building. All I can say is I could never be anyone else, I don’t want to be anyone else, and I’ve never regretted what I’ve done in my life even though I’ve had my nose broken a few times doing it.”
From Hepburn’s perspective, whereas Tracy and Taylor were exactly the people everyone believed them to be, she wasn’t quite the same. She wasn’t interested in putting on a persona, living up to the mythology that had been created around her, or bowing to the standards and conventions of her era. In this instance, a potato she most definitely was not, even though, much like the star herself, the light and buttery snack will live on forever as elite.
