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“... or the greatest chariot-driver. And something a bit similar gives its interest to the career of Katharine Hepburn, making this biography of her as a film star more than readable. She was, as it were, born with a very definite and accepted self, the inherited and environmentally-conditioned personality of a ‘great lady’ on the eastern seaboard of ...”

“... Of all the Hollywood beauties of her time, only Katharine Hepburn had the grace to be irritating. She was beautiful, but not always, her looks could change from shot to shot. She was oddly elegant, sometimes bouncy, sometimes brittle. She was mocking, brash, hoity-toity. What she never was, in her films, was silent ...”

“... the end. The snag is that the heroine can’t be just as human as the rest of us, because she is Katharine Hepburn. A goddess can be fragile, frightened and subdued, and Hepburn is. But not for long, and she certainly can’t be just another frail mortal. What’s more, the heroine can’t turn out to be merely human ...”

“... On screen​ , Katharine Hepburn looks as if she has made a curious contract with time. She has promised not to change, and time has promised not to count properly. Of course time can’t halt entirely. It’s a long long way from May to December, as the song says, or from Bill of Divorcement (1932) to Love Affair (1994), and you can see much of the road in the current season of Hepburn films at the BFI ...”

“... in judgment and everybody gets their just deserts. You might think that a man whose lovers include Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Robert Ryan and Cary Grant must have had some kind of good time, but no one gets to have much fun in Higham’s book. Higham explains ...”

“... the money-shot, so to speak, was not Mike Nichols winning Best Director for The Graduate, but Katharine Hepburn winning Best Actress. Violence might be poetic, sex might be a form of loneliness, uh-huh, and racism might be a scar on the soul of the nation, but an elderly actress proving she’s still got the chops will get the tears flowing every ...”

“... an elegant and slow movie about the Italian romance of a no longer young American woman played by Katharine Hepburn. It was shot entirely on location in Venice, and Rossano Brazzi as the love interest comes a distinctly poor second to the city. Lean and H.E. Bates had taken an Arthur Laurents play and reworked it thoroughly until it began to resemble an ...”

“... heart. Much virtue in honesty: yet Me (subtitled Stories of My Life) provides an uneasy title for Katharine Hepburn’s memoirs, not least grammatically, since although ‘I’ seems even less viable an alternative, ‘me’ is after all the done-to rather than the doer, and Hepburn, a great doer, is never knowingly ...”

“... like an idiot and playing the piano like Chico Marx. A year later he made Bringing Up Baby with Katharine Hepburn, which was to make him a favourite of its director, Howard Hawks. Grant and Hepburn were prime screwballs, fast-talking hairbrains who took it in turns to play straight man to each other’s comic. They ...”

“... Him Wrong and I’m No Angel. Best of all – albeit in a big failure – he met George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn on a film, Sylvia Scarlett, that was too daring for its time, in which he played Jimmy Monkley, a Cockney con artist, and felt able to be himself.He needed this, for his life was in crisis. In late 1933, at his father’s repeated ...”

“... be put alongside their official portraits. Hatshepsut seems to have had a distinct look of Katharine Hepburn. ‘Mummie is become merchandise,’ wrote Sir Thomas Browne in the 17th century, ‘Mizraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsam.’ For physic, too, incredible as it seems that this horrible black human biltong was actually sought ...”

“... One of the things that screwball comedies teach us is that you have to be a little crazy, like Katharine Hepburn, to get things right. Or at least, like Cary Grant, attuned to someone else’s craziness. This is why it is so satisfying that Christian Bale, as Michael J. Burry, is central to the story. He has a glass eye because a childhood illness ...”

“... is of their number: Jean Harlow, Rosalind Russell, Irene Dunne, Barbara Stanwyck, Carole Lombard, Katharine Hepburn, Maria DiBattista. A professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton, and published by Yale, she is heaped with Ivy League credentials but laudably determined not to be stifled by them. Especially in its wide-ranging and ...”

“... however careless and impromptu, into our own sightlines. The new biography of Audrey Hepburn, by Barry Paris, a writer already praised for his books on Louise Brooks and Garbo, is an acute, tender-hearted and entertaining dish of Hepburn facts – he interviewed friends and family, and has a sharp eye for her ...”

“... with the biggest stars: ‘ferocious women like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck and Katharine Hepburn’, on the one hand, and, on the other, excessively noble women like Loretta Young and Greer Garson. Garson was preceded by Norma Shearer and followed Deborah Kerr – ‘and lest anyone think we have left such female characters behind in ...”