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She made her two best-remembered early comedies in 1938, both with Cary Grant, illuminating Philip Barry's rueful social comedy Holiday, then giving herself over to the frenzied farce of Bringing Up Baby, in which she pours the anarchic energy of all the Marx Brothers into her slim, forceful form. She's jaw-droppingly enchanting in these two films, but by now her ferocious femininity had perhaps worn moviegoers out. A prominent movie exhibitor declared her (though not Grant) "box-office poison," and RKO was done with her.
Not to worry: Hepburn had Barry write her a fat Broadway hit, The Philadelphia Story. She secured the movie rights, persuaded MGM to make it with her as the star and got pleasantly pawed by Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Hepburn was back to stay. But Barry's plot had given producers a naughty idea. If they couldn't tame Kate by breaking her will or scaring her off, they would put their annoyance with her airs in the script. From then on, many of her films--Woman of the Year, The African Queen, The Rainmaker--are about the coarsening or humanizing of Hepburn by some rough all-American Joe.
Fortunately for Hepburn, the first of these Joes was Spencer Tracy. In him she met her match and the love of her life. In their nine films together--and offscreen as well--he was the solid earth she stood on, soared from and, when her flights became too dizzying, was brought back to. Tracy and Hepburn didn't wed in real life. (A Roman Catholic, he refused to divorce his wife.) But their film teaming was, in its way, an ideal second marriage: a union of equals, each distinct and distinguished, blending without surrendering a jot of their tetchy personalities.
Their two best films together were written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and directed by Hepburn's forever friend George Cukor (10 collaborations across four decades). In the buoyant, caustic Adam's Rib, she is a lawyer so full of herself that she drives Tracy nuts. The effortlessly charming Pat and Mike showcases the athletic talents that her father had encouraged. Of the angular sportswoman, Tracy quips, "Not much meat on her, but what there is, is 'cherse.'"
Outside the genial range of the Tracy-Hepburn movies, which climaxed in 1967 with Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Hepburn was still a game gal. Her Mary Tyrone, in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, is a heroically poignant mother, adrift in morphine, swathed in melancholy. In films she was Hecuba in The Trojan Women and Countess Aurelia in Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot. She played Coco Chanel on Broadway and a divine game of mixed doubles with Laurence Olivier in TV's Love Among the Ruins.
Nowadays actresses are told they are obsolescent in their 30s or 40s. At twice those ages, Hepburn was too restless to retire, too smart to reduce her grandeur to sitcom size. So On Golden Pond, the 1981 family drama in which she partnered for the first time with Henry Fonda, was a godsend. In Fonda she recognized a star of a precious truculence akin to hers. Before they began shooting, she handed him a present: Tracy's favorite hat.