Jake Gyllenhaal names cinema’s greatest-ever double act: “The two of them together will never age”
There’s an indefinable magic about witnessing a great movie pairing; watching a film that crackles with the spark of two actors riffing off one another, or dancing together, or having smouldering chemistry. It has been that way since the beginning, from Laurel and Hardy to Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, and it continues to this day. Could anyone watch Hot Fuzz without smiling outwardly at the bromance between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost?
Then, there are some actors, like Jake Gyllenhaal, who are even lucky enough to have one in the family. He and his star of The Dark Knight sister, Maggie, have a combined box office haul in the billions, including starring together in the wonderfully creepy Donnie Darko.
One often thinks of the golden age of Hollywood when thinking about iconic movie duos. Major studios realised that combining star power was an effective marketing tool, aside from providing serious chemistry onscreen. It led to moments that have stood the test of time and are seared into all film fans’ brains. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman at the airport in Casablanca springs to mind, in which almost every line is now a famous quote, and the pair stare into each other’s eyes so effectively, as if they’ve evidently forgotten they’re simply acting.
And that golden age of double acts inspires Gyllenhaal when selecting some of his favourite movies, specifically featuring the immense talents of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. The pair were a cinematic couple that worked together on some nine movies, over the course of 25 years, many of which were spent in a relationship that they tried to keep a secret, right up until Tracy’s death.
It was clear the two had something special right from the word go as their first film together, 1942’s romantic comedy Woman of the Year, opened to critical acclaim. Hepburn and Tracy hadn’t met before beginning work on the film, which tells the story of two newspaper colleagues from different sides of the track who marry in haste, then repent at leisure. The characters echoed the actors’ real-life upbringings, with Hepburn the daughter of a surgeon and Tracy the son of a truck salesman.
Audiences loved the quickfire banter between the pair, their ease on camera and obvious care for each other translating into engrossing scenes that peppered the next two decades and eight more films, all the way up to 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner alongside Sidney Poitier, a film that earned Hepburn an Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’ some 30 years after her first.
The pair’s on-screen success masked the issues they faced off-screen, however, with the alcoholic Tracy trying to conceal his relationship with Hepburn from his wife and Hepburn, for her part, constantly trying to mother a man she described as “tortured”. That continued up until his health deteriorated badly in the 1960s, when Hepburn moved into his house to care for him for five years before his death in 1967. She didn’t attend the funeral out of respect for his family.
Gyllenhaal picked out two of Hepburn and Tracy’s movies, namely 1949’s Adam’s Rib and the aforementioned Woman of the Year, as films that mean a great deal to him. He explained: “The two of them together will never, ever age. There are scenes in those movies together that could be when you’re watching them today, at this moment.”
He added how intrinsically connected he felt to those movies, highlighting a parental hand in the process, “I remember those movies and my mother would always love those movies, and I would watch those movies with her, particularly Woman of the Year. I remember feeling very specifically [sic] about that movie that I love so much, which is how Spencer Tracy cracks his eggs while he’s making an omelette. I will always crack my eggs like Spencer Tracy because of that movie.”
