Screen icon Hepburn dies

They made nine films together and had a love affair lasting 27 years. He was a devout Catholic estranged from his wife. She was the abrasively independent new woman who had stormed the magic kingdom of Hollywood.

Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, opposites in everything except strength of will, made their private union so respected that even the gossip columnists held their tongues. When Hepburn died at her Connecticut home yesterday, aged 96, one can be sure her spirit rejoined the man who had expired in the next room, in 1967, so suddenly that he had no time to press the SOS buzzer linking her to him like an umbilical cord wherever he moved in the house they shared.

Hepburn's response was stoic and typical. "0h, lucky one. That's the way to exit." She stayed away from Tracy's funeral. But she went to the rest home, helped lift his coffin into the hearse and followed it to the church. "Goodbye, friend ... That's where we leave you." Then she returned home to go on with another quarter-century of life and movie-making.

Katharine Hepburn came from an old Yankee family that had no time for tears. Her father, an eminent surgeon, and her mother, an active suffragette, made the rules she followed in acting as in childhood. Never complain. Don't brag. Seek challenges. Never give up.

After a swift ascent on Broadway - hired, fired, re-hired by impresarios who met their match in the girl with the alabaster skin but flinty spirit, she took Hollywood the same way - by starting at the top. With her third film role, a door-die debutante actress in Morning Glory, in 1933, she clinched the first of four Oscars.

She was a shockingly unconventional contrast to the over-groomed ladies then reigning as screen queens. Athletic as a greyhound in frame and energy, she jogged or biked her way around the studios, sported slacks, her face freckled with vitality and no make-up, gifted with the high cheek-bones that held the canvas of her skin taut to the end of her days like iron hoops on a pioneer's prairie wagon. And that voice! Its Yankee tones grated on nouveaux riches who had power without the aristocratic status that resonated through the shortest word Hepburn uttered.

She used this well-bred self-confidence to define the sort of girl she played - tough, tomboyish, independent and, if spoiled, then deliciously so in movies like Little Women, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday.

Predictably, some hated the airs and graces of the New England in-comer. "Snooty", uppity", "bossy" were words applied to her, usually by other women such as Dorothy Parker, who skewered her ill-judged Broadway comeback in a weak play with the remark that "she runs the gamut of the emotions from A to B".

Her marriage to a socialite stockbroker called Ludlow Ogden Smith had occurred as long ago as 1927, almost by accident. "Luddy and I were alone in the apartment and there was the bed and there didn't seem any reason not to," she tersely recalled. After two weeks, there didn't seem any reason for it, either. So long buried in the past was her one and only try at matrimony that many still assume she lived and died a spinster. "It convinced me friendship was better," she said.

Such a verdict explains the durability of the great team she and Tracy made in comedies like Woman Of The Year, Adam's Rib and Pat And Mike. "I'm afraid I'm too tall for Mr Tracy," she'd said before they met in person. "Don't worry," director Joe Mankiewicz snapped, "he'll soon cut you down to his size."

Their union, on screen and off, was that of "good friends," not lovers,

his relaxed but wily attitude partnering her prickly but appealing impetuosity.

For 20 years, they never needed to rehearse they went so naturally together. Off screen, she sweetened the cantankerous Tracy on his sour days. When his alcoholism laid him flat, she sobered him up. Two weeks after their last film together, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, Tracy died. Hepburn won her second Oscar for it, but always called it "Spence's award".

Her mistrust of marriage understandably stirred the rumour pot about her sexuality. Tracy aside, her strongest ties were with other women. "Women can do anything that men can," she asserted, adding, "except I'd maybe think twice about jumping into a net held by women fire fighters." The dark shading she gave some roles - the mad matriarch in Suddenly, Last Summer - probably reflected childhood traumas. At 14, she found her favourite brother hanging from the rafters, an apparent suicide. She cut him down herself. Family discipline held tight: no one spoke of it again. But acting helped Hepburn let the pressures out.

The passing years didn't stale or cheapen Hepburn. Not for her the horror films or sex dramas with young studs that Bette or Joan accepted. Old studs were another matter, however, and she squared up to two of the best: Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen and John Wayne in Rooster Cogburn.

She won her third Oscar, at 61, playing a tigerish Queen Eleanor in The Lion in Winter, and her fourth, at 74, as Henry Fonda's whimsical wife in On Golden Pond. As she weathered life, so she weathered cruel illnesses that struck at the very root of her acting. Taking a fall into a Venice canal, she contracted a bug that made her eyes water forever afterwards. Then Parkinson's disease turned her head into that of a nodding doll. Her Yankee nature only felt such tribulations were sent to anneal her.

She wore her usual baggy trousers when I last met her, a sloppy T-shirt, a kid's baseball cap, Reeboks, and she knelt at the fireplace holding out a double page of The New York Times to make the flames draw in her New York home amid austere Shaker furnishings.

The voice quavered, but the mind was clear. "I had to be the woman I was or I'd have ended up a victim of the system. I still seethe when I remember how Mr Mayer had a scene added to the end of Woman Of The Year, showing me trying to make Spence his breakfast and making a hash of it - he felt the woman I played was too clever by half and needed humiliating."

Hepburn tilted her head, like a defiant old game bird that shames the hunter out of shooting her. A glint came into her green eyes. (Maybe only a tear, but it made them sparkle). "I was a success because of the times I lived, in narrower times, in every way. I went against the grain. And you know something... ? In time, my style became the style. That's all there was to it."