Katharine Houghton's screen work amounts to one famous part, Joey Drayton in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), a girl written to notice nothing and played without a wink. She spent the decades after it mostly on stage, and came back to films only for small parts.
Fi1m perspective
Joey Drayton comes home with a fiancé and a smile that never once falters, and the smile is the whole part. Rose wrote her as a girl who has never noticed anything, and Kramer wanted her sweeter and more ordinary than articulate, so Houghton spends the film saying, at length and with great brightness, that she cannot see what the fuss is about. Everyone else in the house is allowed a doubt. She is given a wedding to arrange. It is the hardest part in the film, harder than Poitier's brochure of a doctor, because she has to be sincere about something the film itself keeps stopping to argue.
We will admit that Joey wore us down. By the second hour her cheerfulness had begun to feel like a wall between us and the argument the film was supposed to be having, and we caught ourselves wishing she would say one sharp thing. That is not Houghton's fault. She plays exactly what she was handed, and she plays it opposite her aunt, Katharine Hepburn, and Spencer Tracy in their last film together, which is not a gentle room for a first film.
Afterwards she was offered more of the same, turned it down and went back to the theatre. "It was fate," she has said. "I went on to play Hedda and Nora and Nina and Kate." That is Ibsen, Ibsen, Chekhov and Shakespeare, four women who notice everything, and it reads as a correction. She had made her Broadway debut in A Very Rich Woman in 1965, before the film, and she went back to the stage for more than sixty productions, on Broadway, off it and in regional theatres, and wrote plays of her own. We cannot review any of that. We can only note that it is where most of the work is.
She returned to films from the late 1980s in supporting parts, Mr. North (1988), Billy Bathgate (1991), Kinsey (2004), the literary adaptations and ensemble dramas that give an experienced stage actor a scene or two. The last we have seen is The Last Airbender (2010), in which she plays Katara's grandmother in a film we found smothered by its own explanations, and the part is too small to leave a mark.
So Joey is all the cinema kept of her, and it is a part built to hide whatever she had. Watch Guess Who's Coming to Dinner for Tracy, Hepburn and Beah Richards, as we have said before, and spare a thought for the young woman in the middle, asked to be pleased about everything while the grown-ups argue.
Biography
Katharine Houghton (born Katharine Houghton Grant) is an American actress and playwright. She was born on 10 March 1945 in Hartford, Connecticut, and studied at Sarah Lawrence College.
She made her film debut as Joanna 'Joey' Drayton in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), for which she received a Golden Globe nomination. Katharine Hepburn, who played her mother in the film, was Houghton's aunt. She has appeared in later films including Billy Bathgate (1991), Kinsey (2004) and The Last Airbender (2010), in which she played Kanna, Katara's grandmother. Houghton has also worked extensively in theatre and is a playwright. She has been married to actor Ken Jenkins since 1970.
