Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 –
June 29, 2003) was an iconic
American actress of film,
television and stage.
A screen legend, Hepburn holds the record for the most Best Actress
Oscar wins with four, from twelve nominations (Meryl
Streep currently holds the record for most overall acting nominations with fourteen). Hepburn won an Emmy Award in 1975 for her lead role in Love Among the
Ruins opposite her friend Laurence Olivier, and was nominated for four other
Emmys and two Tony Awards during the course of her more than 70-year acting career. In 1999,
the American Film Institute ranked Hepburn as the top female star of all
time.
Hepburn had a famous and longtime romance with Spencer
Tracy, both on- and off-screen.
Hepburn's early years
Hepburn was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, a
successful urologist from Virginia, and Katharine Martha Houghton. Hepburn's father was a staunch proponent of publicizing the dangers of venereal disease in a time when such things were not discussed. Hepburn's mother campaigned
for equal rights for women, and co-founded Planned Parenthood with birth control
advocate Margaret Sanger. The Hepburns demanded frequent familial discussions on these
topics and more, and as a result the Hepburn children were well versed in social and political issues. The Hepburn children were
never asked to leave a room no matter what the topic of conversation was. Once a very young Katharine Hepburn even accompanied
her mother to a suffrage rally. The Hepburn children, at their parents' encouragement, were unafraid of expressing frank views on
various topics, including sex. "We were snubbed by everyone, but we grew quite to enjoy that," Hepburn later said of her
unabashedly liberal family, who she credited with giving her a sense of adventure and independence.
Her father insisted that his children be athletic, and encouraged swimming, riding, golf and tennis. Hepburn, eager to please
her father, emerged as a fine athlete in her late teens, winning a bronze medal for figure skating from the Madison Square Garden skating club, shooting golf in the low eighties, and reaching the semifinal
of the Connecticut Young Women's Golf Championship. Hepburn especially enjoyed swimming, and regularly took dips in the frigid
waters that fronted her bayfront Connecticut home, generally believing that "the bitterer
the medicine, the better it was for you." She continued her brisk swims well into her 80s. Hepburn would come to be recognized
for her athletic physicality — she fearlessly performed her own pratfalls in films such as Bringing Up Baby (1938), which is now held up as an exemplar of screwball comedy.
On 3 April 1921, while visiting friends in Greenwich Village, Hepburn found her older brother Tom (born 8
November 1905), whom she idolized, hanging from the rafters of the attic by a rope, dead of
an apparent suicide. Her family denied that it was self-inflicted, arguing that he had been a
happy boy. They insisted that it must have been an experimentation gone awry. It has also been speculated that the boy was trying
to carry out a trick that he had seen in a play with Katharine. Hepburn was devastated by his death and sank into a
depression. She shied away from children her own age and was mostly schooled at
home. For many years she used Tom's birthday (November 8) as her own. It was not until she wrote her autobiography,
, that Hepburn revealed her true birth date.
She was educated at the Kingswood-Oxford School before going on to attend
Bryn Mawr College, where she was suspended for smoking and breaking curfew, receiving
a degree in history and philosophy in 1928, the same year she had her debut on
Broadway after landing a bit part in Night
Hostess.
A banner year for Hepburn, 1928 also marked her nuptials to socialite businessman
Ludlow ("Luddy") Ogden Smith, whom she had met while attending Bryn Mawr and married
after a short engagement. Hepburn and Smith's marriage was rocky from the start — she insisted he change his name to S. Ogden
Ludlow so she would not be confused with well-known rotund singer Kate Smith. They were
divorced in Mexico in 1934. Fearing that the Mexican divorce was not legal, Ludlow got a second
divorce in the United States in 1942 and a few days later he remarried. Although their marriage was a failure, Katharine Hepburn
often expressed her gratitude toward Ludlow for his financial and moral support in the early days of her career. "Luddy"
continued to be a lifelong friend to her and the Hepburn family.
On September 21, 1938, Hepburn was staying in her
Old Saybrook, Connecticut home when the 1938 New England Hurricane struck and destroyed her house. Hepburn narrowly escaped before
the home was washed away.
Acting career
Theater
Hepburn cut her acting teeth in plays at Bryn Mawr and later in revues
staged by stock companies. During her last years at Bryn Mawr, Hepburn had met a young producer with a stock company in
Baltimore, Maryland, who cast her in several small roles, including a production of
The Czarina and The Cradle Snatchers.
Hepburn's first leading role was in a production of The Big Pond, which opened in
Great Neck, New York. The producer had fired the play's original leading lady at
the last minute, and asked Hepburn to assume the role. Terror stricken at the unexpected change, Hepburn arrived late and, once
on stage, flubbed her lines, tripped over her feet and spoke so rapidly that she was almost incomprehensible. She was fired, but
continued to work in small stock company roles and as an understudy.
Later, Hepburn was cast in a speaking part in the Broadway play Art and Mrs. Bottle. Hepburn was fired from this role
as well, though she was eventually rehired when the director could not find anyone to replace her. After another summer of stock
companies, in 1932, Hepburn landed the role of Antiope the Amazon princess in The Warrior's Husband (an update of Lysistrata), which required her to wear a very short costume and debuted to excellent reviews. Hepburn
became the talk of New York City, and began getting noticed by Hollywood.
In the play, Hepburn entered the stage by jumping over a flight of steps while carrying a large stag on her shoulders — an
RKO scout (Leland Hayward, whom she would later
romance) was so impressed by this display of physicality that he asked her to do a screen test for the studio's next vehicle,
A Bill of Divorcement, which starred John
Barrymore and Billie Burke.
In true Hepburn fashion, she demanded an outlandish $1,500 per week for film work (at the time she was earning between $80 and
$100 per week). After seeing her screen test, RKO agreed to her demands and cast her. At 5 feet, 7 inches (1.71 m), Hepburn was
one of the tallest leading ladies of her time.[1] Her film
career was launched alongside legendary actor John Barrymore and director
George Cukor, who would become a lifetime friend and colleague. In one of Barrymore's many
attempts to seduce her, he pinched Kate's behind on the set. She said, "If you do that again I'm going to stop acting." Barrymore
replied, "I wasn't aware that you'd started, my dear."
To honor the late 20th century legendary actress, a theater is being built in her beloved town of Old Saybrook,Connecticut.
Hepburn lived and died in the Fenwick section of Old Saybrook. In the summer of 2008, the state-of-the-art Katharine Hepburn
Cultural Arts Center and Theater will open.[2]
Film
RKO was delighted by audience reaction to A Bill of Divorcement and signed
Hepburn to a new contract after it wrapped. But her nonconformist, anti-Hollywood behavior offscreen, which would make her one of
the silver screen's most beloved stars and a feminist icon, at the time made studio executives fret that she would never become a
superstar. Though she was headstrong, her work ethic and talent were undeniable, and the following year (1933), Hepburn won her
first Oscar for best actress in Morning Glory. That same year,
Hepburn played Jo in the screen adaptation of Little Women, which broke box-office records.
Intoxicated with her success, Hepburn felt it was time to return to the theater. She chose The
Lake, but was unable to obtain a release from RKO and instead went back to Hollywood to film the forgettable
Spitfire in 1933. Having satisfied RKO, Hepburn went immediately back to
Manhattan to begin the play, in which she played an English girl unhappy with her overbearing
mother and wimpy father. The play was generally considered a flop, and Hepburn's performance elicited Dorothy Parker’s famous quip that the actress "ran the gamut of emotions from A to B."
In 1935, in the title role of the film Alice Adams, Hepburn earned her
second Oscar nomination. By 1938, Hepburn was a bona fide star, and her forays into comedy with the films Bringing Up Baby and Stage Door were well-received
critically. But audience response to the two films was tepid, and the good reviews from the critics were not enough to rescue her
from an earlier string of flops (The Little Minister, Spitfire, Break of
Hearts, Sylvia Scarlett, A Woman
Rebels, Mary of Scotland, Quality Street). As a result, Hepburn's movie career began to decline.
"Box office poison"
Some of what has made Hepburn greatly beloved today — her unconventional, straightforward, anti-Hollywood attitude — at the time began to turn audiences sour. Outspoken and
intellectual with an acerbic tongue, she defied the era's "blonde bombshell" stereotypes, preferring to wear pantsuits and
disdaining makeup. She also had a famously difficult relationship with the press, turning
down most interviews, which did not help her exposure to the public. When she did speak with the press, occasionally she fed them
lies to amuse herself.[citation needed] On her first outing with the Hollywood press corps after the success of
A Bill of Divorcement, Hepburn talked with reporters who had invaded her and her husband's cabin aboard the ship
City of Paris. A reporter asked if they were really married; Hepburn
responded, "I don't remember."[citation needed] Following up, another reporter asked if they had any children; Hepburn's
answer: "Two white and three colored." Hepburn's aversion to media attention did not thaw until 1973, when she appeared on
The Dick Cavett Show for an extended two-day interview.[citation needed]
She could also be prickly with fans — though she relented as she aged, early in her career, Hepburn often denied requests for
autographs, feeling it an invasion of her privacy.[citation needed] However, on movie sets, she was
eager to learn the ways of the grip people and befriended many of them. Even so, her refusal to sign autographs and answer
personal questions earned her the nickname "Katharine of Arrogance"[3] (an allusion to Catherine of Aragon). Soon, audiences
began to stay away from her movies.
Hepburn was already reeling from a devastating series of flops when, in 1938, she (along with Fred Astaire, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, and others) was voted "box office poison" in a poll taken by motion picture
exhibitors.[4] In 1939, Hepburn was going to do
producer David O. Selznick a favor and play the role of Scarlett O'Hara because he did not yet have anyone else signed for the role. Hepburn insisted that she
did not have the lustful sexual appeal that the part demanded and told Selznick that his studio needed to find the woman who
did.[citation needed] Hepburn rehearsed the lines
thoroughly just in case. The night before the deadline, Selznick finally cast Vivien Leigh.
Unbeknownst to Hepburn and the rest of Hollywood, Vivien Leigh was favored for the role early on, but as a British actress, she
was deemed unsuitable for the part.[citation needed] In addition, her affair with Laurence
Olivier while he was in the middle of a divorce made her a controversial pick. The vast "search for Scarlett" was
orchestrated to make it seem as if no other actress could be found, thus limiting the shock of Vivien Leigh landing the role.
Hepburn was later the maid of honor at Leigh and Olivier's wedding in 1940.[5] Hepburn remained a close friend of Vivien Leigh until Leigh's
death in 1967.
Yearning for a comeback on the stage, Hepburn returned to her roots on Broadway, appearing in The Philadelphia Story, a play written especially for her by Philip Barry, a year after Hepburn had starred in the film
version of his play Holiday. She played spoiled socialite Tracy Lord to rave reviews. With the help of ex-lover
Howard Hughes, she purchased the film rights to the play and sold them to MGM, which adapted the play into one of the biggest hits of 1940. As part of her deal with MGM,
Hepburn got to choose the director — George Cukor — and her costars — Cary Grant and James Stewart. She was nominated for an
Academy Award for Best Actress for her work. Her career was revived
almost overnight.
Hepburn and Spencer Tracy
Tracy and Hepburn from the trailer for the film
Adam's Rib (1949)
Hepburn made her first appearance opposite Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year (1942), directed by George Stevens.
Behind the scenes the pair fell in love, beginning what would become one of the silver screen's most famous romances, despite
Tracy's marriage to another woman.
They became one of Hollywood's most recognizable pairs both on-screen and off. Hepburn, with her agile mind and distinctive
New England accent, complemented Tracy's easy working-class machismo. When Joseph
Mankiewicz introduced the two, Hepburn, who was wearing special heels that added several inches to her lanky frame, said,
"I'm afraid I'm too tall for you, Mr. Tracy." Mankiewicz retorted, "Don't worry, he'll soon cut you down to size." As the
Daily Telegraph observed in Hepburn's obituary, "Hepburn and Spencer Tracy
were at their most seductive when their verbal fencing was sharpest: it was hard to say whether they delighted more in the battle
or in each other."
Most of their films together stress the sparks that can fly when a couple try to find an equable balance of power. The sexy
sparring over power and control is almost always resolved in an agreement to share and share alike. They appeared in a total of
nine movies together, including Adam's Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952), and Guess Who's Coming to
Dinner (1967), for which Hepburn won her second Academy Award for Best Actress.
The pair carefully hid their affair from the public, using back entrances to studios and hotels and assiduously avoiding the
press. Hepburn and Tracy were undeniably a couple for decades, but did not live together regularly until the last few years of
Tracy's life. Even then, they maintained separate homes to keep up appearances. Tracy, a Roman Catholic, had been married to the former Louise
Treadwell since 1923, and remained so until his death.[6]
Before Tracy, Hepburn had had relationships with several Hollywood directors and personalities, including her agent
Leland Hayward. Hepburn also had a famous affair with billionaire aviator
Howard Hughes. Tracy, however, seems to have been her one true love. Hepburn took five
years off from her film career after Long Day's Journey Into
Night (1962) to care for Tracy while he was in failing health. Out of consideration for Tracy's family, Hepburn did
not attend his funeral. She described herself as too heartbroken to ever watch Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, saying it
evoked memories of Tracy that were too painful.
Hepburn figures in
