Audacious Dames – Katharine Hepburn – The Lion in Winter

August 18th, 2015 | POSTED BY Brooke Corso

It is in those brief scenes where Henry and Eleanor are alone together, side by side on a step or in front of the hearth, that her composure quakes slightly. Her thoughts withdraw behind her widening eyes, as if she were running her fingers across thirty years of memories with Henry, searching for a one that will draw him back. They have known each other too long for deceit; her feelings for him are openly shared, and he is left to react.“You’re still a marvel of a man,” she admits without reserve. “And you are my lady,” he replies. They keep a thread of truth between them of their identical natures, their past proclivities, and mutual betrayals. “Let’s have a tally of the bedspreads you’ve spread out on,” Henry says after Eleanor describes his affairs as “countless.”

Hepburn’s Eleanor employs her impish preening and devilish smiles to control the strings of the men in her family, securing each son’s future position on the condition of the placement of the two others and pitting each against the others. “You have a gift for hating,” she tells Geoffrey, to which he replies, “You’re the expert; you should know.” Where her husband meets his rivals through bellowing, the women conduct themselves more formally, molding their hatred around the structures of ladylike decorum, which pierces each barb even deeper through the skin.

She uses the assumptions of her age and gender towards an illusion of fading agency in her position as queen. “I had, at one time, many appetites: I wanted poetry and power and the young men and to create them both. I even wanted Henry, too, in those days.” Her competitor for Henry’s affections isn’t much by way of sport: while pretty and blond, most of her appeal is in her youth, and Henry knows when that asset fades he will probably be gone and wants a peace over it that Eleanor isn’t likely to bestow. Alais is adored for her passivity and outward beauty, as Henry says, “Let’s have one strand askew; nothing in life has any business being perfect.” She does as she is told and provides Henry with a contentment that echoes his weariness against war and politics. While far from young, Hepburn gives her queen a tomboyish agility that the child bride lacks, a physical presence honed from years around powerful men and ripened, rather than withered, by her own imprisonment. Eleanor doesn’t let Henry wallow in his fatigue.

Her passion for Henry is freely and yet subtly shown, often masked in negotiations over the fates of their sons and lands under Henry’s command, some of which belongs to Eleanor. He tempts her with freedom, knowing her adventurous nature, in exchange for the Aquitaine for John. “To be bricked in, when you’ve known the world; I will never know how I survived,” she insists, “(You) offer me the only thing I want, if I give up the only thing I treasure.” The sexual tension simmering between the couple bubbles over once they escalate their war against each other, slashing open old wounds and regrets. Watch Hepburn’s face switch instantly from flirtatious to deeply wounded to seething as O’Toole spits his words all over her.

As Henry jumps back and forth from defending the vigor of his age to proclaiming himself an “old man,” Eleanor takes her lumps and revises her strategy. She is at a growing disadvantage with each passing day, while mistresses will always stay the same age. Her self-composure never wanes, nor her sense of humor. “I’d hang you from the nipples,” she says to a gold necklace at her dressing table, “but you’d shock the children.” She has not forgotten how to nurture, as in a scene with Alais, sitting cross-legged in front of a fireplace, but her desire for survival has supplanted regular maternal affection. “Fragile, I am not,” she says, “Affection is a pressure I can bear.” And when she decides to be cruel, her words are brilliantly aimed at whatever weak spot she can deduce through careful study, an intellectual to the end. As they fight, Hepburn’s voice nearly reaches a cackle, forcing the king from the room in anguish as tears pour from her face. What other actress of the time showed such pain behind relish as the dialogue tears through each other’s souls?

This is my favorite Hepburn role because it is the one where she both eschews the Hepburn persona of her earlier roles in the 1930s and 1940s while also using the strength and wit of it to create a character vibrant in its Machiavellian nature. She uses her love for her husband and king to fuel her hatred of his treatment of her and her sons and her schemes for their futures. She is an unapologetic about her sexuality as she is about using it against the simpering creature within whom her husband wants to lose himself. At once, she rails against the restraints of her gender while confidently displaying her mastery of it. It’s as fitting a film for the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s than anything with her much younger colleagues.

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Amy Schumer, Anthony Harvey, Anthony Hopkins, Barbra Streisand, Goldie Hawn, James Goldman, Jane Merrow, John Castle, Katharine Hepburn, Katherine Hepburn, Maggie Gyllenhaal, MGM, Nigel Terry, Peter O’Toole, Rose McGowan, The First Wives Club, The Lion in Winter