The co-star Cary Grant called “The most totally magnetic woman I’d ever seen”
It’s hard to imagine Cary Grant being starstruck by anyone.
Despite his humble beginnings in Bristol, where his family lived in poverty, he was the picture of a Hollywood star from the moment he hit the screen. After years of working as an acrobat, he had an unusual feline grace and a comfort in front of the camera that made him a natural.
During an era when women were the biggest movie stars, his easy charm and quick banter made him the perfect on-screen partner for fiery leading actors like Katharine Hepburn, Irene Dunne, and, later, Grace Kelly.
By definition of their job, most of the women Grant worked with were magnetic. At a time when Hollywood favoured screen presence over everything else, pure, unadulterated magnetism was the name of the game. No other time in history has produced such mesmerising stars, and Grant worked with most of them. Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman — he starred opposite them all. But when it came to measuring star power, there was only one who completely bowled him over.
The moment Katharine Hepburn left Cary Grant starstruck
In 1935, he was cast in the George Cukor movie Sylvia Scarlett. It was to be his first of four pairings with Katharine Hepburn, and she made an instant impression. “She was this slip of a woman,” he recalled of their first meeting, “Skinny, and I never liked skinny women. But she had this thing, this air, you might call it, the most totally magnetic woman I’d ever seen and probably have ever since.” He described her as being inescapable. She commanded attention through her very presence, no matter the context.
At the time, Hepburn was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, having won her first of four Oscars several years before for Morning Glory. They didn’t know it yet, but their careers were destined to be interdependent. Hepburn’s was sliding into an early downturn, which was only compounded by their next two films together, Howard Hawks’s masterpiece Bringing Up Baby and the criminally underrated romantic comedy Holiday.
But as her star faded, his rose. When they were finally paired one last time in 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, it solidified his position as a top box office star and brought her roaring back into the good graces of Hollywood once and for all.
They had no way of knowing all that in 1935, of course, but their chemistry was apparent from the beginning. Off camera, they were equally compatible, though in a purely platonic capacity. Grant respected Hepburn for more than just her appearance and aptitude for the camera. “It wasn’t just the beauty, it was the style,” he explained. “She’s incredibly down to earth. She can see right through the nonsense in life. She cares, but about things that really matter.”
Grant had a troubled relationship with many of the women in his life, especially the ones he married, but his admiration for Hepburn remained ironclad. They only worked together on four movies in the early stages of their careers, but two of them – Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story – remain some of the greatest movies of all time, thanks in no small part to how perfectly paired they were on screen.
