KATHARINE HEPBURN: 1907-2003

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utside 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.

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.