Twelvth century England. An aging King Henry, his young mistress at his side, waits on shore as a small barge approaches. On board, his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine – robes tight around her – sits regally on a wooden “throne.” She has been “let out” for Christmas – let out of the tower where her husband has kept her imprisoned for ten years. She is a danger to him, but today he needs her. Henry has three sons. One will inherit the kingdom. He favors John. She favors Richard. For state reasons, Henry has promised to marry his young mistress to Richard. Now he wants her to marry John, whom his mistress detests. Or he could get Eleanor to agree to an annulment and marry her himself. That is his plot. Eleanor’s? Oh she’s also a plotter, a conniver – capable of cajoling and manipulation. So here begins the duel of minds and spirits which will be background for The Lion in Winter (1968). The king is played by another royal of film, Peter O’Toole; Richard is a very young Anthony Hopkins – you will not recognize him if you know him only as Hannibal Lector. And the queen, Eleanor, in one of her most powerful roles in a lifetime of great performances, is the regal Katharine Hepburn.

Tall, slender, athletic, with her posh upper-class voice, Hepburn has that air of self-assurance – the sense of control in a chaos of intrigue – the feeling of empowerment in a challenging male world. And amazingly, her career lasted a lifetime. What’s more amazing is that we see her great successes and honors, but we also have her early films – some of them soppy – before she developed the power we see in her later work.

Early audiences refused to accept her odd ways: What, a woman wearing pants? Making a love relationship with a married man? And at the end, she had a physical problem – a slight shaking of the head. She never concerned herself with it. Just plowed right around it and said, Let it shake. She was that kind of woman.

To see her career develop, begin with Stage Door (1937), which was notable because it began careers for not only Hepburn but Ginger Rogers and Lucille Ball. Storyline: Young hopefuls live in a cheapie boarding house for ladies of the stage – most of them from New York streets. But now, in walks snooty and elegant Hepburn, daughter of a rich guy who has bought her a part in a play, hoping she will flop and get the stage dream out of her heart. On stage, she’s really awful…she’ll fail. Then her selfish actions cause a friend to suicide. Suddenly, this twinge of the heart turns her into a fine actress and she delivers her famous lines: The calla lilies are in bloom again. Still pretty artificial, but this was the ’30s. Hard to judge by today’s standards. She had gained attention with her role in Little Women (1933), which was a great audience pleaser, but it was early Hepburn – a bit sentimental, in no way the Hepburn she was to become.

The next year, she did Bringing Up Baby - The kind of “screwball comedy” in which Carole Lombard excelled. Hepburn again is a socialite (so popular during the Depression when noboby had anything) – a rich gal whose brother has sent her a tame leopard. She falls for an idiosyncratic paleontologist who is putting together, bone by bone, a great dinosaur. One bone is missing, then he finds it, but in dealing with the crazy socialite, the bone gets stolen by a family pet and buried. The tame leopard gets mixed up with a wild circus leopard, and in one of Hepburn’s great scenes, she decides she must have this guy. She climbs a ladder up to the top of the now-finally-put-together prehistoric skeleton, and she begins to sway on the ladder – closer, farther, closer…she’s funny…her timing is great.

It took Philadelphia Story (1940) to finally bring her into her own. She had suffered several flops, audiences turned away, but she made a smash hit in the stage play so she bought the rights, chose her own male leads, and created one of the most durable films of her career.

She plays a regal, judgmental woman who has no tolerance for the weakness of others – notably her ex who drank too much. He had given her a shove in the face and walked out. Now she’s about to remarry and her ex shows up to jinx the ceremony. Her father has made a scandal of an affair with an actress, and the gossip journal offers not to print the story if two reporters cover the wedding. The ex is Cary Grant, the reporter is James Stewart. What a cast. Her father has accused her of being cold-hearted and a perennial virgin. She’s hurt, and at the evening’s pre-nuptial wedding party, she gets drunk and goes skinny dipping (not explicit – this is the ’40s), and she ends up in the morning not knowing what she did last night. Great scene – her trying to remember what happened, thinking of course the worst (by ’40s standards). One of the joys of hearing these great lines is Hepburn’s voice. She uses it as an instrument – inflexions, rhythms. Actors don’t do that anymore. O’Toole did it. Olivier. Anthony Hopkins can still do it. Don’t expect Johnny Depp or…forget it…not in today’s film.

As she got older, she chose parts to suit her age, but she was always Hepburn. In The African Queen, she plays a buttoned-up (even in hot Africa) spinster. Her brother, a missionary, dies and she’s left at the mercy of Germans taking over the region (WWII). She’s saved by the scruffy, unwashed, alcoholic captain of a little river barge which is held together by wire, rags, and gut determination. They start down the river, he behaves ungentlemanly, she dumps all his whiskey. She is so buttoned-up and haughty. Then they go down the rapids and…surprise…she loves it. As she unbuttons, she conceives an idea. There is a battleship on a lake which guards the German gun-post. By now, the scuffy captain and the spinster are attracted to each other. They will, together, go down the river and blow up the battleship. Their relationship is so beautifully unwound. Just watch it. The “morning after” (what they did unspoken), she brings him a cup of tea and very gentlewomanly asks, “Dear, what is your first name?” So great a scene.

In Suddenly Last Summer (1959), she plays the consummate villain – the domineering mother of a gay son. Mother and son travel each year while he writes his summer poem. Last summer, she was ill and the not-out-of-the-closet guy takes his cousin on the summer trip – cousin played by an absolutely stunning Elizabeth Taylor. The son dies “suddenly last summer,” and the half-maddened cousin comes back with a terrible story. The mother pays a psychiatric hospital to perform a lobotomy to cut the story out of her head. Hepburn is icy, deadly; she will have her way. But a young doctor (Montgomery Clift) drugs the cousin and gets the true story. She was pimping for the cousin…and…if you don’t know this one, I won’t be the spoiler. A must-see revelation.

And then, what I feel is her finest role, Eleanor of Aquitaine against Peter O’Toole (The Lion in Winter). I’ve seen that one 20 times. Can easily see it again.

In the last years, she did TV roles. One role in particular, Glass Menagerie, did not suit her. The play itself, so brilliant onstage, was cut and altered for TV, the guts taken out of it. She was miscast as the controlling mother stuck with a crippled daughter and depending on a son who is dying to escape. They cut out the definitive line: …and you’ll go flying over the Blue Mountains, you ugly, babbling old witch. No son could say that line to Katharine Hepburn.

Finally, head shaking or not, she did brilliantly On Golden Pond (1981) with an also aging Henry Fonda. She was loving wife to an ailing old man not yet reconciled with a daughter (played by Fonda’s own daughter, Jane Fonda). It was true to life and true to heart. Hepburn still had the power. She still had the voice.

Katharine Hepburn is a legacy…and an inspiration. She went onscreen from great beauty to old woman -wrinkled, shaking head, and wispy hair but still elegant. Her lines may have been written for her, but she made them her own…her voice less steady but still her voice.

She deserves a premiere place on your “classic” shelf.