Glenn Close Says Katherine Hepburn Quote Inspired Her to Act: 'I Never Looked Back'

More than 50 years later, Glenn Close recalls the advice from a screen legend that inspired her to pursue acting.

The Oscar nominee recently described her “immense respect” for Katherine Hepburn and revealed how the late actress inspired her to pursue acting while she was attending Virginia’s College of William & Mary.

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“What I always loved about Hepburn was that she really seemed to know who she was,” Close said recently. People.

She remembers seeing Hepburn appear in a The Dick Cavett Show in 1973 while she was painting sets for her school theater.

“I remember her saying, ‘No regrets, no regrets.’ It was amazing,” she said. “She was so phenomenal, so herself. So the next day I went to the (theater) department chair and said, ‘Please give me a series of auditions.’ And that’s how I got my first job that fall.”

Katharine Hepburn appears on The Dick Cavett Show on September 14, 1973. (ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images) — Katharine Hepburn appears on *The Dick Cavett Show* September 14, 1973. (ABC Photo Archive/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)

Katharine Hepburn apparaît sur <em><button class= — Katharine Hepburn appears on *The Dick Cavett Show* September 14, 1973. (ABC Photo Archive/Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images)

Close recalls that she “went straight from college to my first job on Broadway the fall I graduated,” adding, “Then I did theater for six years before I got into my first movie, which is The World According to Garpand I never looked back.

THE Deliverance The actress also had the opportunity to meet Hepburn and tell her about her experience after she honored the actress at the 1990 Kennedy Center Honors. “She was wearing a black raincoat, a white shirt, black pants, and really shiny black Reeboks,” Close recalls. “And everyone was in dresses and jewelry. And she looked fabulous.”

Close said that Hepburn later sent her “the most fantastic letter,” which read: “Aren’t we lucky to be in this terrible profession, this terrifying profession and, let’s face it, this delightful way of spending one’s life?”

Hepburn, who won four Oscars for best actress in Morning Glory (1933), Guess who’s coming to dinner (1967), The lion in winter (1968) — for which she tied with Barbra Streisand funny girl — and on The Golden Pond (1981), died at the age of 96 in 2003.

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