The co-star Katharine Hepburn slapped in the face: “Don’t worry, you pig”
Katharine Hepburn was not a woman to suffer fool’s gladly, and she wouldn’t put up with any guff from her co-stars. This is why she took a young co-star from a 1968 classic to the side before the shoot began and read him the riot act. She knew he had a reputation as a party animal who enjoyed a drink – or ten – but she let him know in no uncertain terms that she wouldn’t tolerate him turning up to set late or hungover.
It seems he largely obeyed her commands, aside from on one occasion – so she gave him a backhanded slap across the face to snap him back to attention.
When Hepburn received a script in 1967 with a note attached to it from 36-year-old Lawrence of Arabia star Peter O’Toole, she was in a bad place. Spencer Tracy, her longtime secret lover, had passed away only a week before, but as his mistress, she couldn’t be seen to be mourning his death. O’Toole knew this and saw an opportunity to offer her a ray of light.
The legendary star cautiously cracked open the script, entitled The Lion in Winter, and found out the young British actor wanted her to play Eleanor of Aquitaine opposite his Henry II in the film. At the time, Hepburn was 61, but O’Toole intended to use makeup to make him look more age-appropriate to her. In 2008, he told The Daily Mail, “She phoned up right away and said, ‘I might as well do it before I die.'”
Hepburn agreed to make the film despite full knowledge of O’Toole’s reputation at the time. He was known to be a hellraiser who drank extremely heavily and was regularly worse for wear while trying to work. This likely contributed to him being labelled a tyrant on set, with a quick temper, but Hepburn was determined to nip this in the bud.
On one day early in the shoot, she reportedly told him, “Peter, stop towering over me. Come and sit down and try to look respectable.” This was after she’d already pulled him on day one to say, “You’re known to be late. I intend for you to be on time. I hear you stay out at night. You’d better be rested in the morning if you’re going to work with me.” Her tactics worked, too, because O’Toole confessed – in a semi-joking fashion – that she reduced him to a shadow of his “former gay-dog self. She is terrifying. It is sheer masochism working with her.”
In 1985, Hepburn was the first to admit that their working relationship turned physical – and not in the way O’Toole, who professed to love her “in the proper platonic sense,” may have secretly wanted. During some sort of argument about a makeup man, he annoyed her so much that she confessed to UPI, “I hauled off and gave him the back of my hand.” However, she quickly added, “It improved him. Peter admitted that.”
In 2008, O’Toole revealed that this wasn’t the only time Hepburn laid a hand on him in anger. “We were filming one day, and I kept her waiting on set because I was still in my caravan, playing cards,” O’Toole remembered. “She stormed in and shouted, ‘You are a real nut and I’ve met some nuts in my day.’ And then she hit me.”
Instead of being upset that she struck him, though, O’Toole said he waited a few hours and then sheepishly visited her with a present in hand to say he was sorry for keeping her waiting. The uncompromising Hollywood star simply smiled and said, “Don’t worry, pig. I only hit the people I love.”
While this relationship certainly sounds highly dysfunctional to modern ears, it didn’t seem to put any kind of dampener on O’Toole’s affections for Hepburn. In fact, in 1972, he was asked by The New York Times if he had trouble working with her on The Lion in Winter, and he loudly scoffed, “Trouble with Kate? I worship that bloody woman. I’ve never enjoyed working with anyone so much in my whole life, not even Burton. There were no problems, not a one.”
