Katharine Hepburn's letters show she was no damsel in distress.
A four-letter word she refused to see excised from a script and a run-in with a traffic officer are among glimpses of the late Katharine Hepburn revealed in a trove of personal papers donated to the New York Public Library.
The library said it had accepted the gift,
including scrapbooks, journals, photographs and letters, from the estate of the late film and stage legend who died aged 96 in 2003.
For the most part, they provide a familiar portrait of an actress prone to feisty, even haughty, behaviour. Everything in the collection relates to Hepburn's long and sometimes problematic stage career.
A separate hoard of papers pertaining to her cinematic career has been donated to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles.
An assiduous diarist, Hepburn, who lived most of her life in Connecticut, kept a record such as of a 1950-51 road tour with As You Like It. In Oklahoma, her car was stopped for speeding and she and her driver were escorted to a nearby lawyer's office.
"I have been arrested by this moron," she declared upon arrival, according to her notes. She also recalled seething as it became clear that no one could find a judge. "I said I was sorry I did not have a week to take off and if I ever found an Oklahoma car in Connecticut, I would flatten all the tyres."
There are many letters of admiration from colleagues such as Laurence Olivier, Henry Fonda and Judy Garland.
"I've always said you were our leading actress," Garland wrote to Hepburn in 1952 during a stint in The Millionairess on Broadway. The collection also includes an exchange of letters in 1971 during a tour of the musical Coco, about Coco Chanel.
Hepburn is dismayed after being told that a four-letter word in the script - "shit" - had to be dropped for performances in Los Angeles because of audience sensibilities.
She said such censorship was "curiously head in the sand" in "an era of literature and cinema and theatre where every other expression is a four-letter word".
- Independent
