5. KATHARINE HEPBURN (1907-2003)



Given her longevity, and her four Academy Awards (out of a total twelve nominations), it's easy to forget what a tough time of it Hepburn had early in her career. With the aristocratic-goddess bone structure that was built to last and the tremulous voice and her no-nonsense regal quality and the tall frame and strapping physicality that went with it, she stood apart from the run of Hollywood ingenues in the 1930s: a Fox News commentator would proclaim her "elitist"-like. (In her first movie, she played John Barrymore's daughter. In her first Oscar-winning role, in Morning Glory, she played an ambitious young actress who cares more about her career than about finding love with Mr. Right -- exactly what the mass audience had been indoctrinated to view as an unsympathetic character.)  She had great successes in such comedies as Bringing Up Baby and Alice Adams, but there was always a love-hate relationship going on with her and the movie audience, and after a string of flops (which included a number of deadly costume dramas but also the inventive and risky Sylvia Scarlett, where she was in male drag for most of the picture) got her designated box office poison by distributor's groups. She retreated to Broadway and came back in the film version of the hit play The Philadelphia Story -- which made her bigger than ever, but in a comedy whose point was partly to bring her down a peg. Her character there has to be humiliated a little so that she can be humanized and become more of a regular Josephine Sixpack, an idea that was also a constant of the many, mostly dull movies she made with Spencer Tracy. She left a more durable image co-starring with Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen -- a comic marriage of mismatched equals -- and in the very fine 1962 version of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. She spent much of her last several years tending to her image and the images of those closest to her in a string of books and interviews.

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On the occasion of the release of Scarlett Johansson's debut album, Matthew Oshinsky has assembled a handy wrap-ups of actors, or at least professional camera subjects, turned vocalists. It comes divided into categories: "the teenyboppers" (Annette Funicello, David Cassidy, Hillary Duff); "former child stars" (a category that, perhaps surprisingly, seems to be the likeliest to yield an actual recording career, along the lines of those enjoyed by Janet Jackson, Phil Collins, and Alanis Morissette); and my personal favorite, "former soap stars" (including Rick Springfield, who Oshinsky notes "was already a popular singer in his native Australia when he suddenly found himself on millions of afternoon TV screens in 1981 [on General Hospital] and learned that he didn’t know what popularity meant"). For those fully fledged adult mainstream celebrities who decide that this is their big chance to show that they've still got what they had at the high school talent show, Oshinsky favors the label "Meatheads." Here we find your Russell Crowes, your Eddie Murphys, your Steven Seagals (no shit, really!?), and Bruce Willis, whose 1987 Motown release The Return of Bruno (with backup work by Booker T. Jones and members of the Temptations) tried to hedge its bets by presenting itself as a "soundtrack" to an HBO special in which Willis pretended that he was pretending to be a legendary white soul singer on the comeback trail. He thus hedged his bets in a way that, in this specialized field, passed for clever, inviting people who noticed that his music sucked to treat the whole thing as a joke. His hideous, malformed cover of the Staples Singers' "Respect Yourself" made it to number five on the charts anyway. If I live to be a thousand, I will never understand how anyone could miss the 1980s.

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