Amazon.com Katharine Hepburn, one of the great American actresses, stars in this film adaptation of one of the greatest American plays, Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. Hepburn plays Amanda Wakefield, a faded Southern belle now living in a small urban apartment, where she suffocates her two children--her restless son Tom (a very young Sam Waterston) and her painfully shy daughter Laura (Joanna Miles)--with her incessant mixture of insistent cheer and guilt. After much prodding from Amanda, Tom finally brings home a friend from his workplace, in the hopes that he might strike up a romance with reclusive Laura. The result is one of the sweetest and most heartbreaking scenes ever written. Hepburn's steely will and sudden vulnerability make her ideal for the domineering mother, but the entire cast--including Michael Moriarty as the "gentleman caller"--is superb; Moriarty and Miles deservedly won Emmy awards for their performances. --Bret Fetzer

Description After what producer David Susskind called "the longest wooing for a part in a lifetime of dealing with stars," four-time Oscar winner Katharine Hepburn (On Golden Pond) made her television dramatic debut as the indomitable, overbearing matriarch, Amanda Wingfield, in Tennessee Williams' poignant 1945 memory play, which reteamed her with director Anthony Harvey (The Lion in Winter). "The Glass Menagerie" portrays a mother whose preoccupation with her past as a Southern belle and her unrealistic dreams for her children's futures threaten to smother her painfully shy daughter (Joanna Miles) and her aspiring writer son ("The Killing Fields'" Sam Waterston). Michael Moriarty plays the gentleman caller whose visit offers false hope and disrupts the family's precarious balance. 1973-74 Emmy Awards - Best Supporting Actor, Michael Moriarty; Best Supporting Actress, Joanna Miles.