When Katharine Hepburn appeared in this documentary at the age of 85, it was a year after she had published herautobiography, Me: Stories of My Life – stories from which she repeats on camera. Not exactly all about her, but still very much focused on a star who was, at various times, deemed “unusual”, “box-office poison”, and a feminist trailblazer in a film industry built on familiarity, money and misogyny. The film focuses on Hepburn’s journey toward self-understanding, on discovering who she was and refusing to let that be moulded by Hollywood. In her early career, she often played women who were oversensitive and prone to overreaction, characters who, through a humiliating process, would ultimately appear tender and real – they became themselves. It was a hit-and-miss game: playing a Scottish gypsy in The Little Minister was a miss, but playing Mary, Queen of Scots was more of a hit, at least artistically. The misses piled up so heavily that, by 1938, she dropped out of the movies for a time. During that break, she discovered what could work for her: playing like-minded characters – independent women –in scripts she had personally selected. Then she met Spencer Tracy, fell in love with him, was loved in return, and co-starred with him in eight films. Tracy, who had initially considered her a peculiar woman with ambiguous sexuality and dirty fingernails, ended up dying in the kitchen of their shared house.
Active in television since the late 1960s, director David Heeley convincingly weaves together home movies, still photographs and film clips. The simplicity of his films is both their charm and their weakness. Still, this is a major document: Hepburn reminiscing about a life on stage and screen in a quavering, delightfully staccato voice as she does her house chores. “Oscars are nice,” Hepburn says as she spreads the washing on the grass, “but they are not much help when it comes to doing the laundry.” Heeley portrays her as someone striving and succeeding in living an ordinary life, even if there was nothing ordinary about the actor herself.

Ehsan Khoshbakht