Katharine Hepburn and “The Creature”: The performance that almost ended an icon
If you’re going by Oscar wins, then Katharine Hepburn is the greatest actor of all time, male or female.
A four-time ‘Best Actress’ winner, the stoic starlet has more acting prizes than anyone else; more than Daniel Day-Lewis; more than Meryl Streep; more than Jack Nicholson. Her films are still pawed over and picked apart almost a century after they debuted, with her name acting as a byword for a certain era of Hollywood glamour.
Perhaps more than her films, Hepburn is best known for being a nightmare to work with. High confrontational and with an ego the size of Saturn, she ruled over ever set she ever stepped onto with an iron fist. Was it just a big head? No. This was a serious temperament that had roots that buried down further than the original story.
1934 was a bad year for a lot of people, and Hepburn struggled when the script for The Lake landed on her desk. The legendary stage actor was excited to work with Jed Harris but her dream job was quickly determined as a devilish nightmare. Everything about The Lake was off. Harris couldn’t pull everything together, which flustered the typically unflappable leading lady. She got some of the worst reviews of her career and ended up paying a huge sum of money to leave the production before it ended.
The Lake had thrown a major spanner in the works. Hepburn had been flying high off the back of her first Oscar win, but now, she found herself something of a laughingstock, her reputation right back to where she started. She was still in her 20s, a long road ahead of her if she wanted it. To claw her way back, she had to harden, and that’s exactly what she did.
In Kate: The Woman Who Would Be Hepburn, biographer William J. Mann marks this as the moment that his subject’s infamously fierce public persona was born. “After the pain and disappointment following the disaster of The Lake, a new, stronger, more publicity-savvy individual emerged, one that Hepburn always called ‘The Creature,’” he wrote (via Vanity Fair). “In real life, she continued to think of herself as ‘Kathy’ or ‘Kath’, the names she’d been called as a girl. ‘Kate’ was for the public. She spoke of this other self to the Bryn Mawr graduating class in 1985 as ‘this terrible character, Katharine Hepburn, whom I’ve invented.’”
As soon as “The Creature” made itself known, Hepburn’s career got right back on track. She was even able to mock The Lake and its failings in her film Stage Door, directly lifting a line from the play in a wink and a nod to the audience. But the steel came at a cost. The armour she’d built put her at odds with almost everyone she crossed. On the set of The Lion in Winter, she even clashed with Peter O’Toole — and he was hardly the only one to feel the full force of her fury.
Hepburn’s nephew Kuy summed up his aunt’s predicament perfectly when he said, “She couldn’t live up to the image, even though she was the one who created it.” Her ‘creature’ might have lifted her out of the muck, but it cast her as a villain in an era where the public needed no excuse to cut down powerful women. At the end of the day, Hepburn enjoyed a long and successful career, one that might have never happened had she not reinvented herself. Was that worth the personal cost? Only she could say for sure.
