Katharine Hepburn in The Glass Menagerie

I haven't seen it but Pauline Kael said she was terrible in it.

I thought it was a great production of it. Best on film.

The Laura and Michael Moriarty are really great together.

R1- Pauline Kael was TERRIBLE as a drama critic.

It was directed by Anthony Harvey who directed Hepburn in The Lion in Winter (1968) and Grace Quigley (1984) with Nick Nolte

All four actors were nominated for Emmys with two wins.

Hepburn is essentially miscast in that role.

The. End.

How so r6?

Moriarty got some great reviews and an Emmy as the Gentleman Caller. He won a Tony the same year playing a gay man in "Find Your Way Home," but his career was soon undermined by his alcoholism and erratic behavior.

it's available on YouTube. Waterson is bland and stagey and so ultimately is Hephurn. Everything feels rushed, hurried which is at odds with the delicacy of the play. Not good nor compelling.

Miscast. Amanda is kinda daffy. Geraldine Page, Shirley Booth, Angela Lansbury... but not Kate.

The Joanne Wooward version isn't very good.

I saw Jessica Lange in London and she did pretty well with it.

I enjoy the movie but

[quote]Hepburn was able to actually pull off a southern accent.

That's hilarious.

Tallulah Bankhead apparently had an amazing screen test for the 1950 version. But they wouldn't hire her because she was too much of a drunk.

Maureen Stapleton was pretty terrific on Broadway years ago, with RIp Torn as Tom and the 1st Paul Rudd as the Gentleman Caller.

Do we have a Katherine Hepburn Troll now?

No, she was awful in it, as she was in everything; maybe even worse than usual here.

[quote] It's the one time Hepburn was able to actually pull off a southern accent.

Bitch, where? She still sounded like a New England Yankee in her version.

I would have liked to have seen Vanessa Redgrave in the role.

Sada Thompson would've been terrific as Amanda.

A neighbor of mine saw Laurette Taylor in it. He said he was in the Army and got free or discount ( forget) tickets.

R16 No, she doesn't.

Back then there were things like this on network TV. Plays. Imagine that. We had to watch it as a homework assignement.

*assignment

Kael said that Hepburn simply chatters on and doesn't make the audiences listen. Kael was the biggest Hepburn fan of perhaps any critic.

I'm surprised people still remember anything Pauline Kael said.

Hepburn was too patrician. She could never go beyond that aspect of her personality. She made it work in “The Lion in Winter” and “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner.” But Amanda Wingfield is a lower middle class woman who puts on airs. You have to believe that Amanda may have had gentleman callers and it’s hard to think about Hepburn having sex at all, never mind receiving dates from men.

There was nothing patrician about Jo March in Little Women, or Eva Lovelace in Morning Glory, and she did pretty well as those characters.

...or Alice Adams.

I saw Jessica Lange in it on Broadway with an extra lisp-y Sarah Paulson as Laura. Christian Slater and Josh Lucas were the dudes and both were pretty hunky at the time. I seem to recall it getting not-so-great reviews but I liked it.

Back in the early '90s I saw a terrific production of it at a playhouse near Rancho Mirage with Angie Dickinson as Amanda and Lucie Arnaz as Laura, I believe Dan Lauria and Richard Masur were the two males.

[quote]Sada Thompson would've been terrific as Amanda.

And Kristy McNichol as Jim.

[quote]Hepburn was too patrician. She could never go beyond that aspect of her personality.

True. No matter what kind of character she was playing she always came across as upper class.

Bette Davis, on the other hand, could convincingly play characters from any kind of socioeconomic class.

Hepburn wasn't exactly from high society.

She had a certain poise but she actually played in a lot of things like Pat and Mike, The African Queen, The Rainmaker, Summertime, Desk Set, and Long Day's Journey Into Night that were not aristocratic parts.

r33 she still came off like an aristocrat.

R34 Well I think you're choosing to see her as an aristocrat, or you can't get past it.

[quote]Back in the early '90s I saw a terrific production of it at a playhouse near Rancho Mirage with Angie Dickinson as Amanda and Lucie Arnaz as Laura, I believe Dan Lauria and Richard Masur were the two males.

How were the entrees at this dinner theater?

No r35 she just played every role upper class.

[quote] Hepburn wasn't exactly from high society.

???

Her father was an eminent Hartford urologist, and her mother was a Houghton, and thus an heiress to the Corning glass works fortune. (The Harvard rare book library is named after the Houghton family).

Tennessee Williams based Amanda Wingfield on his mother a, who, despite being from Ohio, was a true Southern belle, vain and flirtatious, alternating between stern mother hen and coquettish mademoiselle. Lange's interpretation was closer to Williams' intent; however, this didn't go over too well because everybody was used to Laurette Taylor's original interpretation and subsequent adaptations modeled after that performance.

I haven't seen Hepburn's interpretation, but I imagine she she gave a mannered performance.

^ I wrote Williams mother's name, but somehow it only posted 'a.'

R38 I didn't say they weren't well off. They weren't "aristocrats." Katharine's great uncle was the president of Corning Glass, her grandfather killed himself when Kate's mother was 14 or so. Kate's mother was 16 when her mother died. Katharine wasn't a debutante or something like that.

I don't know what you mean by "aristocrats," then. The Houghtons certainly were (and still are) an important East Coast family, and quite socially prominent.

You know, Kate parents were political progressives, her mother was a suffragist and birth control advocate. I don't think they seemed to be very interested in social prominence. Katharine grew up as a tomboy. This wasn't the Vanderbilts or the Whitneys. But I think you know what I mean, by now.

A long held rumor was that Hepburn was born a male.

There's a rumor that Tennessee Williams was born a male too.

Redgrave’s southern accents in “Orpheus Descending” & “Two Mothers for Zachary” are distractingly bad.

Contrary to public opinion, most British actors do lousy American accents.

Vanessa Redgrave is curiously cast in a Merchant Ivory produced adaptation of Carson McCullers’ The Ballad Of The Sad Cafe, made by Simon Callow. It’s a weird performance, necessarily, but she is watchable. It’s obvious why Simon Callow was attracted to the material but it is so specifically regional would have been better served by an American director.

As an aside, I shared a Eurostar table from London to Paris with Simon Callow. I would normally completely ignore anyone famous, but as we engaged in chit chat as we settled into our seats, I had a feeling he would be obliging with a theatrical anecdote. And he was. I told him I had read his BFI book on Night Of The Hunter and he lit up like a rainbow. We talked about Wilde and Dickens the entire way.

Cherry Jones did the best Amanda I’ve ever seen. Sally Field not so much.

I liked Woodward.

[quote]Contrary to public opinion, most British actors do lousy American accents.

I've heard many who do a cross between Texas and Brooklyn. The drawl of Texas with the harsh nasality of Brooklyn.

I think Emilia Jones' does a great American accent. I was shocked when I saw her in Locke and Key and found out she was British.

I thought her performance was a little shaky.

Didn't she do a southern accent in Suddenly Last Summer?

R53 No, she didn't.

How was Vivien Leigh's?

How was Vivien Leigh's what?

R56 Vivien's southern accent.

She wore her Philadelphia Story dress...

R57 I think she had a southern accent in three movies, all different. But she didn't do The Glass Menagerie.

R42- The Roosevelts we’re certainly Aristocratic.

Julie Andrews does a great middle America accent in Thoroughly Modern Millie.

I didn't like her Amanda.

RE: S, LS: Can you imagine Kate's Venusian flytrap?

[quote]Julie Andrews does a great middle America accent in Thoroughly Modern Millie.

If you like twee.

R61- She also plays a great soft butch LESBIAN in that movie.

[quote]Contrary to public opinion, most British actors do lousy American accents.

And there’s no reason for it these days. With the internet, you can listen to American shows (and Americans can listen to British radio) and hear different accents. I’m listening to LBC right now, not so much for content but to hear different accents of the people calling in.

Katharine Hepburn's lifelong dream was to appear in a production of-

Daughters Of Bilitis

and

Sisters Of Sappho

R65- They surveyed British actors- Which is the hardest American accent to do, they hardest accent for them to do was the New York accent. I would agree. Emma Thompson in Angels In America- she played a nurse to Pryor Walter. She had such a fakey New York accent. It was an imitation of an accent. She's otherwise an excellent actress.

[quote]Which is the hardest American accent to do, they hardest accent for them to do was the New York accent.

In all fairness, even native New Yorkers sound fake. The New York accent is a weird one.

R29, Back in the early '90s I saw a terrific production of it at a playhouse near Rancho Mirage with Angie Dickinson as Amanda and Lucie Arnaz as Laura, I believe Dan Lauria and Richard Masur were the two males.

Really? And in what dinner theatre was this? Was it like Florida's Finest Play House?

Judith Ivey was a great Amanda.

[quote]Lucie Arnaz as Laura,

Laurence should have talked her out of it.