How Katharine Hepburn became David Lean’s favourite actor to direct: “She is a joy”
Katharine Hepburn worked hard to earn a record four Oscars. She wasn’t necessarily trying to win the awards (she didn’t even show up to the ceremonies), but she was striving to be the best at her profession. She was dedicated to her craft, with a formidable work ethic that often intimidated those around her. Her career spanned six decades, and during that time, she worked with some of the greatest filmmakers of all time.
The one who had the greatest impact on her early career was George Cukor, who made ten films with her, including the 1940 classic The Philadelphia Story and the 1952 comedy Pat and Mike, co-starring her real-life partner Spencer Tracy. She also worked with and won over the famously tough John Ford in Mary of Scotland and the famously adventurous John Huston in The African Queen.
In the mid-1950s, however, she made a particular impression on David Lean, the English director who made the classic wartime romance Brief Encounter and would go on to make such epics as The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia. He cast her in his 1955 film Summertime, in which she plays an American spinster who fulfils her lifelong dream of travelling to Venice and has a brief affair with a local antiques dealer.
For Hepburn, the film came at a delicate time. She was still recovering from a bad case of dysentery that she had picked up while shooting The African Queen in the Belgian Congo, had just lost a fortune trying unsuccessfully to bring the play The Millionairess to the screen, and had undergone surgery on her face to remove skin cancer. She was self-conscious about her appearance, all the more so because she was nearing 50. “Being an actor is such a humiliating experience because you are selling yourself to the public, your face, your personality, and that is humiliating,” she said. “As you get older, it becomes more humiliating because you’ve got less to sell.” Even worse, her relationship with Tracy was at a low point, and she arrived in Venice vulnerable and uncertain about her future.
Despite these circumstances, or perhaps because of them, Hepburn turned in one of her best performances, and Lean was thrilled to be working with her. He would later say that she was his favourite actor he ever worked with. “She’s a joy,” he said in a 1963 interview with CBC’s Close-Up. “She’s a wonderful technician and she has I think a great, great gift. On top of that, I happen to like her very much personally. She’s a great human being.”
Hepburn might not have offered the same praise if she’d been asked about him. Lean famously insisted on shooting his films on location, and while that has made him one of the most visually striking and influential filmmakers in cinematic history, it also made his sets difficult to work on, especially for the actors. In one scene, Hepburn’s character had to fall backwards into a canal while trying to take a picture of a storefront, and Lean insisted that she do so in real life.
After the scarring experience on The African Queen, Hepburn was wary about getting into the notoriously unsanitary waters of Venice. They compromised by lowering plastic barriers into the water and disinfecting it with chlorine, but after four takes, Hepburn ended up getting conjunctivitis in her eyes anyway, an affliction that stuck with her for the rest of her life. It wasn’t a happy production for her, but she turned in a stellar performance and earned Lean’s life-long admiration.
