KATHARINE Hepburn arrived at the King's Theatre, Glasgow, in May 1952, the star of a touring production of George Bernard Shaw’s play, The Millionairess.
She won excellent reviews for her role as a wealthy woman who marries a man only when he can turn £50 into £50,000, and who later accepts a challenge to support herself unaided for six months in order to marry another man.
It was a performance, this paper said, “of great vitality. At first it seems over-strident, with little variation in tone, and very restless, but from the moment that Miss Hepburn appears in the basement in the second act, the character falls into place, and her performance is brilliant”.
The Evening Times critic pondered: “Shaw’s millionairess is certainly an unusual female – even for Shaw, it is no simple job convincing an audience that there is anything credible in a beautiful young woman who is so unhappy in her millions that she is a tornado, earthquake, and volcano rolled into one. Yet who could be more suited to it than Hepburn, with her panther-like movements, her harshness of voice, and her general vitality?”
In 2007, a 1952 letter from Judy Garland to Hepburn, praising her performance in the play on Broadway, surfaced in a trove of Hepburn’s personal papers relating to the theatre: “Dear Katie, I’ve always said you were our leading actress, and what everyone is saying out here about you in the new play just about clinches the title for you”.
Hepburn is pictured, right, with Robert Helpmann and Cyril Ritchard.
One Glasgow theatre-goer complained in the Glasgow Herald that Hepburn’s “otherwise impeccable” performance was spoilt at the beginning by “insensitive” applause from the audience, forcing her to repeat her initial entrance.
Read more: Herald Diary
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