Worldandnation: Ms. Hepburn has long been immortal

Katharine Hepburn seemed indestructible, I guess, despite her advanced years. Logically, anyone living to age 96 should be expected to be near the end of her life. Not Ms. Hepburn, whose fearless behavior on and off the screen made her a Hollywood immortal before such a classification became appropriate.

Propriety wasn't Ms. Hepburn's style. If it were, she would never have been a creative force in the film industry when men exclusively ruled movie studios. While other women made it big by playing sexy, dumb or subservient to male co-stars, Ms. Hepburn dressed like a man sans makeup, yet acted like a lady and gave as good as she got when wisecracks started flying.

Hepburn was her own woman in an era when that was a dangerous decision in any profession. Moviegoers preferred their "actresses" demure and seductive, like women in general were supposed to be. They stayed away from her films during the 1930s, leaving her labeled by U.S. theater owners as "box office poison."

She retreated to the Broadway stage in The Philadelphia Story, a play she commissioned, then used the comedy of manners as a vehicle to return to Hollywood on her own terms, choosing her director and co-stars.

Movies are the domain of the young these days, and Ms. Hepburn never got around to making an impression on their level.

Considering that the largest demographic of today's moviegoers is ages 15-24, it's a safe assumption that modern filmgoers generally know Ms. Hepburn only through parental nostalgia and cable movies channel-surfed past on the way to MTV.

They're probably the same people who revere Madonna, J-Lo, Beyonce Knowles or anyone pampering herself enough to be declared a diva these days, never considering that such assertiveness had classier origins in Ms. Hepburn's career.

Too many generations have passed without admiring her plucky spirit in her ingenue phase: the closeted tomboy Jo March in Little Women and chatty, ambitious Eva Lovelace in Morning Glory (both 1933), or that spirit's evolution into a superb comedian in Bringing Up Baby (1938) and The Philadelphia Story. You can bet that stars like Julia Roberts and Julia Stiles paid attention.

Young women should experience Ms. Hepburn's roles from the 1940s: Classically comical battles of the sexes with Tracy in Adam's Rib (1949), Woman of the Year (1942) and especially State of the Union (1948), in which her mother's suffragette influences shine. Then young film fans should trace her maturation into more than a match for tough guys such as Humphrey Bogart (The African Queen, 1951) and John Wayne (Rooster Cogburn, 1975).

Any woman today can look to Ms. Hepburn as a cinematic role model for patient motherhood, the power appearing to be behind the throne - see Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) - but appropriately on equal footing by the climax. And they can learn how to age gracefully from Ms. Hepburn, pushing herself into taxing emotional roles like Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie and Edward Albee's A Delicate Balance when her peers were dead, unemployed or settling for cranky old woman roles in Hollywood's typical degrading of stature.

Hepburn wouldn't allow that to happen to her legacy. When roles dried up, she bowed out. Perhaps now she'll get the credit deserved for that, while those of us who already understand ponder what comes after "immortal."

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Ms. Hepburn has long been immortal