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Anne Marie with the second half of the two-part post on the Best Actress tie for 1968. Part One is here if you missed it.
The audience of the 41st Academy Awards roared its approval when Ingrid Bergman announced that Hollywood newcomer Barbra Streisand had tied Katharine Hepburn for Best Actress in a Leading Role. But though Streisand has since achieved immense popularity and icon status, this win is still questioned by some. After all, Hepburn was a giant among giants, giving the performance of her career in The Lion in Winter alongside a stellar cast with a sizzling script. Barbra was certainly the best part of an otherwise unremarkable musical. As a highly fictionalized version of famous vaudevillian Fanny Brice, Stresiand packed a ton of charm, chatter, charisma, and chutzpah into one role. But is that enough to warrant an Academy Award?
As a bit of context for the impending Supporting Smackdown (get your votes in), we'll be celebrating 1968 daily at Noon for the rest of the month. Here's Anne Marie on a favorite Oscar moment.
It was the night of April 14th, 1969. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was packed with stars for the 41st Academy Awards. When it came time to award the Oscar for Best Actress, presenter Ingrid Bergman stuttered with shock as she announced that two women had tied. Her surprise was understandable; there had been no tie in the acting branch for over thirty years. BarbraStreisand, only 26 years old, tripped over her sparkling sailor suit as she approached the podium to accept her Oscar for Funny Girl. Katharine Hepburn was characteristically absent for her historic third win, so the director of The Lion In Winter accepted on her behalf. This joint win was more than just a peculiar footnote in Oscar history. This was a rare case of the Academy getting it exactly right twice with one award.
As has been extensively documented here at The Film Experience, the Academy is often maddeningly predictable in its awards-giving. However, at its best an Oscar can be a celebration of an explosive newcomer on the cusp of an incredible career (e.g. Vivien Leigh in Gone With The Wind) or a salute to a seasoned veteran for a risky performance at her artistic peak (e.g. Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire). In 1969, both happened: Katharine Hepburn won for the second time in a row for a virtuosic, against-type performance as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion In Winter, and BarbraStreisand won for her instantly-iconic turn as Fanny Brice in her very first film, Funny Girl. While these two women can share that Oscar win, they certainly cannot be confined together to a single blog post. If you'll forgive my fangirl squeals of excitement, I'll start with Hepburn.
Anne Marie here with some sculptural Friday fun. Recently, while watching Dick Cavett's immortal interview with Kate The Great, I rediscovered my favorite quote about Katharine Hepburn, or rather her cheekbones:
"The greatest calcium deposits since the white cliffs of Dover."
Hepburn undoubtedly had the best cheekbones in cinema history, but there is a veritable mountain range of other great calcium deposits in Hollywood past and present.
Here's a small smattering of my favorites:
Of course, this list is nowhere near complete. Who's your favorite broad with good bones?
Andrew here, shining a final light on Katharine Hepburn, a postscript to TFE's generous Katharine Hepburn week despite our host never having been a huge fan. Nathaniel’s write-up on Katharine’s twelve Oscar nominations nailed one of the key oddities of the icon's Oscary career. Her win in 1967 for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was only the second Oscar she picked up, a full 35 years after her screen debut. For perspective, by that time her biggest peers of the day - Bette Davis, Olivia De Havilland and Ingrid Bergman had already picked up dual statues.
It must have seemed unlikely by then that Katharine was ever going to get a statue to keep her Morning Glory trophy company, especially since with Spencer Tracy’s declining health she was working less and less. Consider: she'd made 15 films in the thirties, 11 in the forties, 7 in the fifties but Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in 1967 was only her second film that decade. I'd argue that this win marks the only legitimate sentimental win for Kate, though Oscar's love for sentiment is not something new to any of us.
Like all of her Oscar wins, Katharine was not there to accept the prize but in Garson Kanin’s memoir of Katharine and Spencer ("Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir") he included a bit about her finding out the news.
She was in France, making The Madwoman of Chaillot when the news came through by telephone. Her housekeepers, Willie and Ida, phoned her from Hollywood, awakening her just before 7. A.M., French time.
“You won, Miss Hepburn!” they shouted. You won the Oscar!” “Did Mr. Tracy win it, too?” she asked. There was a pause before Willie replied, “No, Madam.” “Well, that’s okay,” she said. “I'm sure mine is for the two of us.” The following day, Gregory Peck received a cable:
IT WAS DELIGHTFUL A TOTAL SURPRISE I AM ENORMOUSLY TOUCHED BECAUSE I FEEL I HAVE RECEIVED A GREAT AFFECTIONATE HUG FROM MY FELLOW WORKERS AND FOR A VARIETY OF REASONS NOT THE LEAST OF WHICH BEING SPENCER STANLEY SIDNEY KATHY AND BILL ROSE. ROSE WROTE ABOUT A NORMAL MIDDLE AGED UNSPECTACULAR UNGLAMOROUS CREATURE WITH A GOOD BRAIN AND A WARM HEART WHO’S DOING THE BEST SHE CAN TO DO THE DECENT THING IN A DIFFICULT SITUATION. IN OTHER WORDS SHE WAS A GOOD WIFE. OUR MOST UNSUNG AND IMPORTANT HEROINE. I’M GLAD SHE’S COMING BACK IN STYLE. I MODELLED HER AFTER MY MOTHER. THANKS AGAIN. THEY DON’T USUALLY GIVE THESE THINGS TO THE OLD GIRLS YOU KNOW.
How ironic that last line seems now considering, as Nathaniel says, she gained two more awards at such an old age. By that age Oscar has always fallen out of love with actresses which is one of the reasons I’ve never much minded that her Dinner win is wrapped in sentiment. Of her twelve nominations it’s the least showy of her roles, a steadfastly reactive role but for that delightful “firing” scene. it’s mere happenstance that her birthday fell on Mothers’ Day this year but even if the performance does not rise to the top in the annals of great Katharine Hepburn performance it takes on a lovely, if sentimental, meaning as a reminder of great mothers everywhere. Kate had no children herself but between domineering mothers in Suddenly Last Summer, drug addled ones in Long Day’s Journey into Night and generally perfect ones in On Golden Pond, Christina Drayton in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner is perhaps her best one. True, that stands as little reason to hand out Oscars but who’d have imagined one year later she’d be breaking the record for most Best Actress wins?
In 1967 this second Oscar must have seemed like the ultimate reward to an actress who was already a legend and that acceptance telegram does read as particularly charming. Happy birthday, Kate.
We end our Katharine Hepburn theme week on The Great Kate's birthday, today! Katharine Hepburn made 43 motion pictures in her 62 years on the big screen. How many have you seen? I've collected the posters here of only her Oscar nominated roles, 12 of them in total, because 43 is too many for an episode of posterized. Let's get all the Hepburn/Oscar talk out of our systems. Starting now...
Two things are thrown into sharp focus when looking at that sprawling Oscar track record stretching from 1932 to 1981. First, that though only Meryl Streep has ever bested her for Most Lead Actress nomination (14 versus 12) at least a couple of Hepburn's nominated roles would probably have been considered "Supporting" by today's much looser non-definition of the category (i.e. anything goes). Second, though four Oscars is still the record for any actor, male or female, her reputation as an Oscar magnet is arguably over stated since AMPAS weirdly didn't become OBSESSED until after she'd passed the age by which they usually start ignoring great actresses! A full 2/3rds of her nominations came after she turned 40 and 75% of her wins were after the age of 60! This is rather shocking considering that only 8 Best Actress Oscars have been handed out to women over the age of 60. Three of those eight times the name being read out was "Katharine Hepburn".
Thursday, October 24, 2013 at 2:00PM 
