WHO'S THAT LADY? Rex Reed's salute to Katharine Hepburn in The New York Observer offers a peculiar mix of metaphors and similes describing the late actress.

There's Kate as tropical windstorm: "George Cukor said she swept through Hollywood in 1932 like a typhoon, insulting everyone in sight—a freckled snotty eccentric who wore men's clothes and fought senselessly with everyone in sight."

Then there's equine Kate: "She said her father told her, 'Kate, you're stubborn as a horse with blinders on, ignoring trends, true to your own beliefs no matter what anybody says, and you'll probably end up alone. Pause. And thank god for that.'"

Rex himself plunges into aquatic imagery when describing Kate circa 1979: "She was 71 then, an elegant old trout of boundless energy and surging spirit who made the young film stars of the day look like a pile of dead sea moss."

Yet by the end of the piece, he tosses the fishy metaphor in favor of one or two others: "Katharine Hepburn, a first edition in an age of Xerox. Gone at 96, but still stalking."

Perhaps this bizarre wordplay reflects Kate's own tastes when it comes to describing people. Rex remembers her saying, "Spencer Tracy and Laurette Taylor, my favorite actors, were like baked potatoes. One look at them and you just knew they'd taste as good as they looked. Me, I'm more like the Flatiron Building. All I can say is I could never be anyone else. I don't want to be anyone else, and I've never regretted what I've done in my life even though I've had my nose broken a few times doing it."

Typhoon...horse...trout...first edition...Flatiron Building. Kate Hepburn was all that—and much, much, more.

She was Jo March in Little Women...Tracy Lords in The Philadelphia Story...Tess Harding in Woman of the Year...Rose Sayer in The African Queen...and dozens of other characters who were often (though not always) more nuanced than the movies and plays that they inhabited. Here's to all the Kate Hepburns—not least the inimitable author of the 1992 memoir Me.