I have a friend, an aspiring actress, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Katharine Hepburn. 

This resemblance is not merely physical. Like Hepburn, my friend is sharp-witted, intellectual, opinionated, highly independent and at times slightly mannish. I find her very attractive.

But I’m left wondering: could this constellation of personal traits make for a major movie star today? My hunch is that if Hepburn were starting out now, she would have little chance of becoming the box office and Oscar phenomenon that she ultimately became. And I’m inclined to wonder if actors like Hepburn’s sometime screen partners Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart could be popular male romantic leads today either.

Yet in 2000, Hepburn and Bogart were voted the two greatest screen actors of all time in a Library of Congress-sponsored poll, while Hepburn and Tracy were perhaps the greatest male-female comedy team in screen history. Why have the signal qualities that these actors possessed — maturity and intelligence  — become faults today?

Consider Hollywood’s latest flavors of the month — Keanu Reeves, Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Anniston, Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson, Chris O’Donnell, Vin Diesel, Brad Pitt, and Jennifer Garner — and it’s clear that brainiacs need not apply.

Hollywood film executives have apparently concluded that audiences out in the heartland multiplexes aren’t comfortable anymore with intelligent actors like Bogart or Tracy. Would any studio today cast Claude Raines as the lead in a special effects-driven feature like "The Invisible Man"? The male leads today must be either young and pretty (think Leonardo DiCaprio, Pitt or Tobey Maguire) or, for action films, physically powerful and bluff (Russell Crowe or Vin Diesel).

For female roles, the Julia Roberts template has become the mould for most every actresses who seeks to be a star. Women today like to watch spunky everywoman types that they can relate to — slender, graceful fantasy versions of themselves.

The values of the 1930’s and, for that matter, the 1950’s, a time when Hollywood was still in the business of selling male stars who projected adulthood and responsibility — like William Holden and Gregory Peck — are obviously in abeyance, if not decline.

Some of this change, of course, reflects the declining average age of film audiences. But this isn’t the whole explanation. For Hollywood is as much reflecting the public moods and desires as it is shaping them.

So, if American women want to know where all that sober "husband material" they once sought has gone, maybe they should ask themselves if they’ve adequately sought for and respected it. Likewise, if women resent being reduced in male eyes to the position of tarts like Britney Spears, then maybe they need to learn to root again for stars with dignity and smarts: actresses like Kate the Great was. What we herald and applaud, we become.

—The Eds.