Katharine Hepburn: This Week's Ungirdled Celebrity!

I don’t have to tell you who Katharine Hepburn is.  As an Ungirdled woman, you probably love her too.  She is the ultimate Ungirdled woman.  She holds the record for most “Best Actress” Oscars with four wins out of 12 nominations.  She is also the winner of an Emmy, two Tonys, and eight Golden Globes!  I think my all time favorite Hepburn picture is a tie between The Philadelphia Story and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner.  If you haven’t seen either of these, rent them as soon as you can.  I can’t imagine you wouldn’t enjoy them too.  We lost Katharine in 2003 at age 96.  She lives on in so many wonderful films, her fascinating autobiography Me and a biography Kate Remembered by longtime friend A. Scott Berg who she asked to write her story and publish it after her death.  Both are great summer reads.  Katharine lived a truly Ungirdled life.  

Here are some favorite Ungirdled quotes from Katharine:

• I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be the inferior sex.

• Life is to be lived. If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting. And you don't do that by sitting around wondering about yourself.

• Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.

• If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased.

• If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.

• Enemies are so stimulating.

• Loved people are loving people.

• Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get — only what you are expecting to give — which is everything. What you will receive in return varies. But it really has no connection with what you give. You give because you love and cannot help giving.

• If you want to sacrifice the admiration of many men for the criticism of one, go ahead, get married.

• Plain women know more about men than beautiful women do.

• If you’re given a choice between money and sex appeal, take the money. As you get older, the money will become your sex appeal.

• Life can be wildly tragic at times, and I've had my share. But whatever happens to you, you have to keep a slightly comic attitude. In the final analysis, you have got to not forget to laugh.

• Life is hard. After all, it kills you.

• I don't think that work ever really destroyed anybody. I thik that lack of work destroys them a hell of a lot more.

•  Dressing up is a bore. At a certain age, you decorate yourself to attract the opposite sex, and at a certain age, I did that. But I'm past that age.

•  Never complain. Never explain.

Click here for a short clip that shows Kate at her Ungirdled best in Guess Who's Coming To Dinner!  Links to two books I thoroughly enjoyed: