Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born on May 12, 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut, the second of six children in a prosperous and unusually progressive household ^[1]. Her father, Thomas Norval Hepburn, was a urologist who campaigned publicly for education about venereal disease at a time when the subject was barely mentionable. Her mother, Katharine Martha Houghton, was a suffrage activist who later worked alongside Margaret Sanger in the birth control movement ^[2]. Both parents encouraged their children to exercise their minds and bodies freely, and Hepburn grew up swimming, playing golf and tennis, and speaking her opinions without apology.

The family suffered a devastating loss in 1921 when Katharine, then thirteen, discovered the body of her older brother Tom, who had died by hanging while the two were visiting relatives in New York ^[1]. The event marked her deeply. She withdrew from regular schooling for a period, was educated by tutors, and for years afterward used Tom's November birthday as her own in public statements.

Hepburn entered Bryn Mawr College in 1924, following her mother, who had graduated from the same institution. Her academic record was uneven at first, but she found her footing in campus theatricals and graduated in 1928 with a degree in history and philosophy ^[2]. By the time she left Bryn Mawr she had already decided on an acting career, a choice her father regarded with skepticism but did not block.

Anyone asking who was Katharine Hepburn before Hollywood knew her would find a young stage actress with a bumpy start. She joined a stock company in Baltimore in 1928 and made her Broadway debut later that year, but her early theater work was marked by firings and mixed notices as directors struggled with her untrained voice and headstrong manner ^[3]. She kept working, took voice lessons, and gradually earned better parts.

The turning point came in 1932 with the Broadway play The Warrior's Husband, in which she made a striking entrance carrying a stag on her shoulders. The performance caught the attention of Hollywood scouts, and RKO signed her ^[3]. Her first film, A Bill of Divorcement (1932), directed by George Cukor and starring John Barrymore, made her a screen name almost overnight. Cukor became a lifelong friend and directed her in ten films.

Success arrived quickly. For her third picture, Morning Glory (1933), she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and the same year she played Jo March in Cukor's Little Women, a major box office hit ^[4]. Yet the late 1930s brought a slump. A string of commercial failures, including the screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938) with Cary Grant, now considered a classic but a money loser on release, led a theater owners' trade group to label her and several other stars 'box office poison' in 1938 ^[3]. Rather than accept diminished studio offers, Hepburn bought out her RKO contract and went back to the stage.

Hepburn engineered her own comeback with a shrewdness few actors of her era matched. Playwright Philip Barry wrote The Philadelphia Story with her in mind, and she starred in its hit 1939 Broadway run. Crucially, with help from Howard Hughes, she acquired the film rights, which meant no studio could adapt the play without her ^[1]. MGM's 1940 film version, with Cary Grant and James Stewart, restored her standing completely and brought her a third Oscar nomination ^[4].

Any list of Katharine Hepburn achievements centers on her record at the Academy Awards. She won Best Actress four times: for Morning Glory (1933), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968, shared with Barbra Streisand in a rare tie), and On Golden Pond (1981) ^[4]. No other performer has won four Oscars in a lead acting category. Her twelve Best Actress nominations, spread across five decades, stood as the record until Meryl Streep surpassed the nomination total in 2003.

Her partnership with Spencer Tracy produced nine films together, beginning with Woman of the Year (1942) and including Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952), comedies that played their offscreen chemistry against battle-of-the-sexes plots ^[5]. Working with director John Huston, she starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen (1951), shot under difficult conditions in the Belgian Congo and Uganda; the film earned her another nomination and remains among her best loved performances ^[3]. She also kept returning to the stage, playing Rosalind in As You Like It on Broadway in 1950 and touring Australia with the Old Vic company in 1955, and she performed Shakespeare at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut ^[2].

Hepburn married once, in 1928, to Ludlow Ogden Smith, a Philadelphia businessman. The marriage was brief in practice; the couple divorced in 1934, and Hepburn later said plainly that her career had come first ^[1]. She never remarried and had no children. In the 1930s she was linked with the agent Leland Hayward and with the aviator and producer Howard Hughes, who remained a friend and business ally after their romance ended.

Her most significant relationship was with Spencer Tracy, which began during the making of Woman of the Year in 1941 and lasted until his death in 1967. Tracy, a Catholic, never divorced his wife Louise, and Hepburn kept the relationship out of the press with remarkable success for twenty six years ^[5]. She scaled back her own work in the mid 1960s to care for Tracy as his health failed. He died seventeen days after they finished filming Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Out of respect for his family, Hepburn did not attend his funeral and later said she never watched the finished film.

Offscreen habits fed her legend. Among the most repeated Katharine Hepburn facts: she wore trousers decades before they were accepted as women's fashion, swam in the cold waters of Long Island Sound nearly every day into old age, gave few interviews for most of her career, and refused to sign autographs ^[2]. She guarded her privacy fiercely but wrote candidly about herself late in life, publishing the memoir The Making of The African Queen in 1987 and the bestselling autobiography Me: Stories of My Life in 1991 ^[6].

Hepburn kept working steadily long past the age at which most stars of her generation had retired. She received Oscar nominations for The Rainmaker (1956), Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), and Long Day's Journey into Night (1962), the last for her performance as the morphine addicted Mary Tyrone in Sidney Lumet's adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play, a portrayal many critics rank with her finest work ^[3].

Her two consecutive Oscars in 1968 and 1969 opened a productive late period. She made her only musical appearance on Broadway in Coco (1969), playing the designer Coco Chanel, and earned a Tony nomination despite her limited singing voice ^[2]. Television offered new territory: she won an Emmy Award for the 1975 movie Love Among the Ruins, opposite Laurence Olivier and directed by George Cukor ^[4]. In 1981 she starred with Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, which brought her a fourth Academy Award and Fonda his only one.

Age and illness slowed her only gradually. A visible tremor, often attributed in the press to Parkinson's disease though she described it as an inherited shake, became part of her later screen presence. She continued acting into her eighties, making her final film appearance in Love Affair (1994). Hepburn died at her family home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, on June 29, 2003, at the age of 96 ^[1]. In her honor, the lights of Broadway theaters were dimmed.

In 1999 the American Film Institute named Hepburn the greatest female star of classic American cinema, placing her first on its list of screen legends ^[7]. The ranking reflected more than longevity. Across some fifty films she established a screen type that barely existed before her: the intelligent, self-possessed woman who neither apologized for her ambitions nor softened her speech to please anyone.

Her influence extended well beyond acting technique. Biographers and cultural historians credit her with widening the range of behavior available to women in American public life, from her insistence on wearing slacks on studio lots to her control over her own material and image at a time when studios owned their stars ^[1]. She managed her career like a producer, buying rights, choosing collaborators, and walking away from bad contracts, decisions that later generations of actors would treat as standard practice.

Institutions preserve her memory on both coasts of her home state and beyond. The Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center opened in Old Saybrook in 2009 in a restored theater near her longtime home, and Bryn Mawr College established the Katharine Houghton Hepburn Center, honoring both the actress and her suffragist mother, to support work on women's issues ^[8]. Her estate's auction in 2004 drew worldwide attention, and her papers, held by the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, remain a primary resource for scholars. Any Katharine Hepburn biography ultimately returns to the same point: she outlasted every fashion in American film by declining to follow any of them.