What a Beaut!: KATHARINE HEPBURN (1907-2003)

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She denied what everyone believed: that she had Parkinson's disease. "I inherited my shaking head from my grandfather Hepburn," she said in the 1993 documentary All About Me. "My head still shakes, but I promise you, it ain't gonna fall off." Still, the baggage of age exasperated her. "It's so endless to be old," she said in 1981. "It's too goddam bad that you're rotting away." The brilliant schoolgirl, intoxicated by life's promise and challenge, had become a sere biddy. The famous voice, now as cutting and quivery as sheet metal, might have sounded scolding to a grandchild. But Hepburn had no grandchildren, no children, no Spence. She was alone.

Hepburn could handle it, because she never lost that almost comically intense belief in herself. She believed in others too, if they would just work hard. There was a streak of the schoolteacher in her, and a tough grader. One imagines her reading her death notices--all raves--as if they were test papers. "Twaddle!" she would write in the margin. "You can do better. I did."

"I've been lucky," she says in her last film, Love Affair. "I always knew what I wanted." She got it, on her own terms. And, being Kate, she gave us so much more.