She was a rare blend of grace and fortitude

Katharine Hepburn was the only great star of Hollywood’s golden age to live into the 21st century, and that is somehow fitting. For not only was she arguably the best actress the studio system ever had, she was also, both on and off the screen, the most indomitable.

Hepburn was admired not only by audiences but by her peers as well as critics. Her four best actress Oscars are an academy record for a performer, as are her 12 best actress nominations. And when the Manchester Guardian polled critics around the world a few years back to name the best ever on screen, she not only handily won the actress category but got more votes than the male acting winner as well.

Yet, though she won her first Oscar on only her third film (“Morning Glory”), Hepburn’s career was not one of unbroken ascent. It was to be 34 years until she won her second (“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”), and in between there was a surprising amount of resistance and negativity to be overcome. Difficult as it is to believe now, Hepburn was once thought of as “box office poison.” She was turned down for “Gone With the Wind” and mocked by Dorothy Parker, who said of one stage performance, “she ran the gamut of emotion from A to B.”

But if Hepburn was an acquired taste, it was one everyone eventually came to share. “It can frankly be said,” noted George Cukor, one of her favorite directors, “that Hepburn has not grown up to Hollywood, Hollywood has grown up to her.” And the actress herself said wryly, “You know, when someone has been around as long as I have, people get fond of you, like some old building.”

Of course there was more to it than that. Much more. For one thing, Hepburn was unapologetic about being ambitious, determined to both be herself and make her most personal qualities work for her. Not for nothing did she name her bestselling memoir “Me.” “Show me an actress who isn’t a personality,” she once said, “and I’ll show you a woman who isn’t a star.”

As a result, audiences often felt that who Hepburn was as a person, just like her inimitable Bryn Mawr accent, bled into her roles in the most satisfying way. And there never seemed to be anyone quite like her: intelligent and irascible, strong yet vulnerable. She was always her own woman, someone who almost willed you to sit up and pay attention. More than almost anything, you noticed the force of Hepburn’s personality, an on-screen fortitude that was always admirable, even dignified, never troublesome. You wanted her to triumph, and you knew she would. Given who she was, how could she not?

When it comes to picking memorable roles, it’s inevitable that there’s not one but several. Hepburn was the quintessential Jo in 1933’s “Little Women,” and the perfect foil for the elegant but overmatched Cary Grant in the screwball masterpiece “Bringing Up Baby.” Hepburn was especially good in those indefinable films based on Philip Barry plays that were romantic comedies as well as something more. Co-starring with Grant again in 1938’s “Holiday” and with Grant and James Stewart in 1940’s “The Philadelphia Story” (both directed by Cukor), she brought a singular richness and empathy to high society affairs of the heart and made them something everyone could appreciate.

Looming largest among Hepburn’s co-stars, of course, was Spencer Tracy. Both great actors on their own as well as off-screen soul mates who never married each other, they created an almost unprecedented on-screen complicity in the nine films they appeared in together, from 1942’s “Woman of the Year” through 1967’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” It was Tracy, fittingly, who in “Pat and Mike” gave the lean Hepburn her most remembered on-screen compliment.

“Not much meat on her,” his character says of hers, “but what there is is cherce.” Cherce indeed.