Katharine Hepburn

Star as Feminist

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by Andrew Britton

Type

Biographies

Subject

Actress > Katharine Hepburn

Keywords

Katharine Hepburn, star, feminism

Publishing date

2003

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Collection

Film and Culture

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Hardcover • 256 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ¼ inches (16 x 23.5 cm)

ISBN-10
ISBN-13

0-231-13276-X
978-0-231-13276-3

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Book Presentation:
Of all the major Hollywood stars, Katharine Hepburn was the least conventional, conforming to none of the stereotypes of female superstardom. She was not an exotic outsider in Hollywood like Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich; nor was she a victim of the studios like Judy Garland or Marilyn Monroe; and she was certainly not a creature of the system like Joan Crawford and Lana Turner. Instead, she always appeared intelligent, willful and independent, able to develop her own persona within the confines of the studio system.

Andrew Britton proposes a feminist reading of Hepburn's films, arguing that her persona raises problems about class, female sexuality, and women's oppression that strain to the limits the conventions of a cinema ultimately committed to the reassertion of bourgeois gender roles. Hepburn's work is also used to explore more general issues, such as the functioning of the star system. This is one of the very few analyses of American cinema to focus on a film star rather than a director or a genre and as such is essential reading for anyone interested in the movies.

First published in the United Kingdom twenty years ago, this lavishly illustrated new edition features a foreword by the noted film critic Robin Wood.

About the Author:
Andrew Britton lectured in film studies at the Universities of Warwick, Essex, and Reading. He also taught at Queens and Trent Universities in Ontario, Canada, and was a guest lecturer at other universities in Britain, Canada, and the United States. He died in 1994.Robin Wood is a founding editor of CineAction and author of Hitchcock's Films Revisited, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond, and Sexual Politics and Narrative Film. He is professor emeritus at York University and the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema Studies.

See the publisher website: Columbia University Press

See the complete filmography of Katharine Hepburn on the website: IMDB ...