David Thomson

"The young Hepburn was a creature of enormous imaginative potency and showy breeding. It was said she was not beautiful. Nonsense: she was ravishing despite thoroughbred features, a skinny body, and a deliberately, if not agressively, emphasized Bryn Mawr accent. Her beauty grew out of her own belief in herself and from the viewer's sense that she was living dangerously, exposing her own nerves and vulnerability along with her intelligence and sensibility. Like Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse, she was a moral being, sometimes at odds with herself, deluded or mistaken, but able to correct herself out of a grave and resilient honesty. Nobody on the screen could be so funny and so moving in making a fool of herself, or so touching in reclaiming her dignity. That is why screwball comedy seemed in her hands one of Hollywood's most civilized forms and it is why Bringing Up Baby is so serious a film--without ever losing the status of being one of the funniest."

David Thomson
A Biographical Dictionary of Film