I don't know if I've ever mentioned it here before or not, but I'm a huge Katharine Hepburn fan. It all started when I was pretty young, maybe 10 or 11, and I saw Bringing Up Baby on American Movie Classics (which actually used to show bona fide classics back then, without commercial interruption! I knew times had changed when I tuned in one evening four or five years ago and they were showing one of the sequels from the Halloween franchise!).
As soon as I saw her in Bringing Up Baby, I became a lifelong fan of Ms. Hepburn, and there were still so many treasures waiting in store for me: The Philadelphia Story, Holiday, and Desk Set, my favorite of her films with Spencer Tracy. That's just the tip of the iceberg, of course. I could probably write all night about which of her films I loved.
Hepburn has been gone for just over six years now, but her work and her legend will likely never die.
The reason I'm bringing her up tonight is that I just read Judy Samelson's article in Playbill about the new exhibit at The New York Library for the Performing Arts. Hepburn's estate turned over all of her papers relating to her work on the stage to the Library and they're now on display there through October 10th.
It sounds like a really interesting exhibit, one that I'd love to see. I'm enough of a fan that I've read just about every biography written about Hepburn and I even bought a second hand copy of the Sotheby's Catalogue for the auction of her estate.
Even if I wasn't such a fan, though, I think an exhibit on her stage career would be fascinating. The films are still accessible, always there to be discovered by new generations of fans, but it's not like there are DVDs out there of her performances on Broadway. They're lost to memory and belong to history, like most of the magic that happens on the stage.
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