Katharine Hepburn

• 1. Introduction

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  Katharine Hepburn won four Academy Awards for Best Actress, a record no one else has matched. She wore trousers before women commonly did. She refused autographs, shunned the publicity machine, and once wrestled a camera from a photographer's hands. When the Independent Theatre Owners of America labeled her "box office poison" in the late 1930s, she bought out her own studio contract, secured the rights to a hit play, and engineered her own comeback on her own terms. She was born on the 12th of May 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut, and died on the 29th of June 2003, at the age of 96, at the family home in Fenwick, Connecticut. Her career on stage and screen spanned six decades. In 1999, the American Film Institute named her the greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema. What made Katharine Hepburn so difficult to dismiss, even when audiences and studios had given up on her? What was the private life behind that iron public image? And how did a woman who married only once, refused to attend her own award ceremonies, and nursed a secret love affair for 26 years end up becoming, as one entertainment journalist put it, "the patron saint of the independent American female"?

• 2. Hartford Roots

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  Thomas Norval Hepburn, a urologist at Hartford Hospital, raised his six children to argue about anything, push their bodies to their limits, and never shrink from a fight. His wife, Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn, headed the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association and later campaigned for birth control alongside Margaret Sanger. The young Katharine joined her mother on several "Votes For Women" demonstrations as a child. Thomas taught his children to swim, run, dive, ride, wrestle, and play golf and tennis. Golf became a particular passion for Hepburn; she reached the semi-final of the Connecticut Young Women's Golf Championship. She also took ice-cold baths every morning, believing, as she put it, that "the bitterer the medicine, the better it was for you". She called herself Jimmy, cut her hair short, and was drawn to performance early, putting on plays with friends and siblings for 50 cents a ticket to raise money for the Navajo people.

  On the 30th of March 1921, when Hepburn was 13 years old, she discovered the body of her 15-year-old brother Tom, who had died during a visit to Greenwich Village. He had hanged himself. The family maintained the death was an accident, not a suicide. The loss changed Hepburn profoundly. She became nervous, moody, and withdrawn, dropped out of school, and was tutored privately. For years afterward she used Tom's birthday, the 8th of November, as her own. It was not until her 1991 autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life, that she revealed her actual birth date.

  By 1924, she entered Bryn Mawr College to satisfy her mother, who had studied there. She struggled academically, was suspended once for smoking, and felt out of place. Acting eventually gave her a foothold. Once her grades improved enough to qualify, she performed regularly, and her lead role in The Woman in the Moon in her senior year earned enough praise to set her course. She graduated in June 1928 with a degree in history and philosophy.

• 3. Getting Fired, Getting Hired

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  The day after graduating from Bryn Mawr, Hepburn traveled to Baltimore to meet Edwin H. Knopf, who ran a repertory theatre company. He cast her in The Czarina, and the Printed Word described her performance as "arresting". She was praised, then immediately criticized for a shrill voice, then sent to study with voice teacher Frances Robinson-Duff in New York City. When Knopf moved The Big Pond to New York and Hepburn was bumped up to the lead role one week before opening night, the debut was a disaster. She arrived late, mixed her lines, tripped, and spoke too quickly to be understood. She was fired that night. The original leading lady was rehired.

  Her Broadway debut came on the 12th of November 1928, at the Cort Theatre, in These Days. Reviews were poor and the show closed after eight nights. She married Ludlow Ogden Smith shortly after, a socialite-businessman she had met at Bryn Mawr, planning to leave the theatre behind. She lasted weeks before returning to an understudy role in Philip Barry's Holiday, which she held for six months.

  The firings continued. A playwright declared she "looks a fright, her manner is objectionable, and she has no talent" and had her removed from Art and Mrs. Bottle in early 1931, only for the production to rehire her when no replacement could be found. Leslie Howard took a dislike to her during rehearsals for The Animal Kingdom in the same year and had her dismissed. When she asked Philip Barry why she had been let go, he replied, "Well, to be brutally frank, you weren't very good." She accepted a small part in an upcoming show, then was asked to audition for the lead in the Greek fable The Warrior's Husband, which opened at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway on the 11th of March 1932. Her first entrance required leaping down a narrow stairway with a stag over her shoulder, wearing a short silver tunic. Richard Garland of the New York World-Telegram wrote, "It's been many a night since so glowing a performance has brightened the Broadway scene." The show ran three months and brought a Hollywood scout to her door.

• 4. RKO and Early Fame

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  Director George Cukor tested Hepburn for the part of Sydney Fairfield in the RKO film A Bill of Divorcement, and came away fascinated. "There was this odd creature," he recalled. "She was unlike anybody I'd ever heard." He particularly noted the way she picked up a glass on screen: "I thought she was very talented in that action." Hepburn demanded $1,500 a week, a substantial sum for an unknown actress. Cukor persuaded the studio to accept, and RKO head David O. Selznick said he took a "tremendous chance" in casting her. Hepburn arrived in California in July 1932, at 25 years old, and starred opposite John Barrymore. The New York Times called her performance "exceptionally fine", and Variety declared she had "a vital something that sets her apart from the picture galaxy". RKO signed her to a long-term contract.

  For her third film, Morning Glory in 1933, Hepburn won her first Academy Award for Best Actress, playing aspiring actress Eva Lovelace. The role had been intended for Constance Bennett, but Hepburn spotted the script on producer Pandro S. Berman's desk and insisted it was hers. She did not attend the ceremony, as she would not for the rest of her career. Little Women, also in 1933, was one of the film industry's biggest successes to that point, and Hepburn won the Best Actress prize at the Venice Film Festival. She later said of her performance as Jo, "I defy anyone to be as good as I was".

  The descent came quickly. Theatre producer Jed Harris, whose career had stalled, cast her in The Lake, which opened at the Martin Beck Theatre on the 26th of December 1933, and was roundly panned. Dorothy Parker's review quipped that Hepburn "runs the gamut of emotions all the way from A to B." Tied to a ten-week contract, Hepburn watched audiences disappear. Harris told her, "My dear, the only interest I have in you is the money I can make out of you." She paid him $14,000, most of her life savings, to close the show. The experience, she later said, taught her to take responsibility for her own career. George Cukor became a lifetime collaborator; the two made ten films together.

• 5. "Box Office Poison" to Comeback

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  After a run of commercial failures through the mid-1930s, including The Little Minister, Break of Hearts, Mary of Scotland, A Woman Rebels, and Quality Street, Hepburn earned the nickname "Katharine of Arrogance" for her refusals to give interviews or sign autographs. She was rude and provocative with the press. When asked if she had children, she snapped, "Yes, I have five: two white and three colored." Producer David O. Selznick refused to cast her as Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, reportedly telling her, "I can't see Rhett Butler chasing you for twelve years." Howard Hawks' screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby in 1938 won critical praise but failed at the box office. The Independent Theatre Owners of America named her "box office poison". RKO offered her a B movie called Mother Carey's Chickens; she turned it down and instead bought out her contract for $75,000.

  Her recovery plan was precise and deliberate. She signed on to star in Philip Barry's play The Philadelphia Story, which was tailored to her strengths, giving her character humor, aggression, nervousness, and vulnerability. Howard Hughes, her partner at the time, sensed the play could restore her career and bought her the film rights before it even debuted on stage. The play opened at the Shubert Theatre in New York on the 28th of March 1939, ran for 417 performances, and toured a second time. She then sold the film rights to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on the condition that she be the star. She chose George Cukor as director and selected James Stewart and Cary Grant as co-stars, ceding top billing to Grant.

  Before filming began, Hepburn was strategic about her reintroduction: "I don't want to make a grand entrance in this picture. Moviegoers think I'm too la-di-da or something. A lot of people want to see me fall flat on my face." The film accordingly opened with Grant knocking her flat on her backside. The Philadelphia Story was one of the biggest hits of 1940, breaking records at Radio City Music Hall. Time magazine wrote, "Come on back, Katie, all is forgiven." She earned her third Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

• 6. Spencer Tracy

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  Hepburn met Spencer Tracy at MGM in 1941, when they were about to begin filming Woman of the Year. She was 34 and he was 41. Tracy was initially wary of her, reportedly unimpressed by her dirty fingernails and suspicious that she was a lesbian. Hepburn said she "knew right away that I found him irresistible". Their relationship lasted 26 years and was largely hidden from the public. Tracy remained married throughout; he and his wife Louise had been living separate lives since the 1930s, but there was no divorce. Hepburn did not interfere. Lauren Bacall, a close friend, later wrote of how "blindingly" in love Hepburn was with the actor.

  Tracy suffered from a severe alcohol addiction and was frequently depressed. Hepburn described him as "tortured" and devoted herself to making his life easier. Reports from people who observed them together describe Hepburn's entire demeanor changing when she was around him. She mothered him, obeyed him, and he became dependent on her. In the early 1960s, she took a five-year break from her career to care for him full-time. She moved into his house. She was with him when he died on the 10th of June 1967. Out of consideration for his family, she did not attend the funeral.

  The two made nine films together, including Woman of the Year, Keeper of the Flame, Without Love, The Sea of Grass, State of the Union, Adam's Rib, Pat and Mike, Desk Set, and the final film, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967. In her autobiography, Hepburn wrote of Tracy, "It was a unique feeling that I had for him. I would have done anything for him." Asked years later why she stayed, she said, "I honestly don't know. I can only say that I could never have left him." It was only after the death of Tracy's wife Louise in 1983 that Hepburn began to speak publicly about her feelings for him.

• 7. Record Four Oscars

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  Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967, which dealt with interracial marriage, reunited Hepburn with a visibly dying Tracy. He died 17 days after filming his last scene. The film was Hepburn's most commercially successful picture to that point, and her win at the Academy Awards came 34 years after her first. She felt the award honored Tracy as much as herself.

  She grieved by working. She chose to play Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter in 1968, opposite Peter O'Toole. Filming took place at Montmajour Abbey in the south of France. Director Anthony Harvey described her as "enormously vulnerable" throughout production. John Russell Taylor of The Times called it "the performance of her career", proving she was "a growing, developing, still surprising actress". The film was nominated in all the major categories at the 41st Academy Awards, and for the second year running Hepburn won Best Actress, this time shared with Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl. The two performances together also earned her a British Academy Film Award for Best Actress.

  Her fourth and final Oscar came for On Golden Pond in 1981, playing opposite Henry Fonda. Jane Fonda had purchased the screen rights for her father. The film was the second-highest-grossing picture of that year. Hepburn was 74 at the time of filming and dived fully clothed into Squam Lake for the role. Film historian Homer Dickens noted it was widely regarded as a sentimental tribute to her enduring career rather than a competition win. She also received her only Emmy Award, for the 1975 television movie Love Among the Ruins, a London-based Edwardian drama with Laurence Olivier. In 1985, the American Humanist Association gave her its Humanist Arts Award, recognizing her public declarations of atheism. In 1991 she told a journalist, "I'm an atheist, and that's it. I believe there's nothing we can know, except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people".

• 8. Later Life and Legacy

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  Hepburn made her final screen appearance in Love Affair in 1994, at 87 years old, playing a supporting role alongside Annette Bening and Warren Beatty. It was the only film of her career, apart from a wartime cameo in Stage Door Canteen, in which she did not play the lead. Roger Ebert noted that while she moved more slowly, the "magnificent spirit" was still visible and her scenes "steal the show". Her final role was in the television film One Christmas, also in 1994, for which she received a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination.

  Her 1991 autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life, topped best-seller lists for over a year. Her health declined through the 1990s; she was hospitalized for pneumonia in the winter of 1996, and her niece described her as a "private person" by 2000. In May 2003, an aggressive tumor was found in her neck. She declined medical intervention and died from cardiac arrest on the 29th of June 2003, at the family home in Fenwick, Connecticut. She was buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford. Hepburn had requested no memorial service. Broadway dimmed its lights on the evening of the 1st of July 2003 in her honor. In 2004, her belongings were auctioned at Sotheby's in New York City; the sale garnered $5.8 million, which she had willed to her family.

  Hepburn's influence extended well beyond her films. Film academic Andrew Britton described her as "a consistent, potentially radical disturbance" within classical Hollywood, central to bringing feminist issues to the screen. She is listed in the Encyclopaedia Britannica's "300 Women Who Changed the World", Ladies Home Journal's 100 Most Important Women of the 20th Century, and Variety's "100 Icons of the Century". Film historian Jeanine Basinger, speaking after Hepburn's death, put it simply: "What she brought us was a new kind of heroine, modern and independent. She was beautiful, but she did not rely on that."