When Katharine Hepburn was up for the title role in George Bernard Shaw's play, The Millionairess, the playwright wanted to know how athletic she was.
"What sort of an athlete is Kate? She has to do judo. That's what you call jiu-jitsu," Shaw asked.
Told that Hepburn was an accomplished athlete who played tennis every morning, the playwright declared that it was too dangerous to cast her.
"Dangerous for the actor she's doing the judo with. She'll probably kill him," he said.
"Oh, no, GBS," producer Lawrence Langner replied. "She's a very tender-hearted girl. She wouldn't kill another actor."
The exchange is among the anecdotes recorded in 22 boxes of the actor's private papers that her estate gave yesterday to New York Public Library.
When Hepburn died in 2003 at the age of 96, the trustees of her estate donated papers from her film career to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Margaret Herrick Library. The New York papers relate to her less well-known and sometimes rocky career on the stage.
"Hepburn didn't throw away much, so there are boxes and boxes and roomfuls of material," said Cynthia McFadden, co-executor of Hepburn's will.
The papers include letters Hepburn sent during a US tour of As You Like Itin the early 1950s, one of which recounts her arrest for speeding in Oklahoma.
Taken by the police to a lawyer's office, Hepburn pointed to the police officer and declared: "I have been arrested by this moron."
Her fury grew as they were unable to find a judge. "I said that I was sorry I did not have a week to take off," she wrote, "and if I ever found an Oklahoma car in Connecticut, I would flatten all the tyres."
There are fan letters from Judy Garland and from Charlton Heston, who wrote in 1981: "you have made all our hearts tremble, one time or another."
An entire package of letters focuses on the controversy surrounding Hepburn's use of a four-letter word in Coco, a play based on the life of fashion designer Coco Chanel. When the play went to Los Angeles, Hepburn was contractually forbidden to use the word, which her character uttered when her latest collection was savaged by critics.
During the same tour, Hepburn made a rare political statement, delivering a curtain speech to commemorate four anti-war students shot by the National Guard at Kent State University in 1970.
"Now, you may call them rebels or rabble rousers or anything you please," she said. "Nevertheless, they were our kids and our responsibility. Our generation are responsible, and we must take time to pause and reflect and do something."