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Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May
12, 1907 – June 29, 2003) was
an iconic star of American film, television and stage, widely recognized for her sharp wit, New England gentility and
fierce independence. A screen legend, Hepburn holds the records for the most Oscars (4) and also Best Actress nominations
(12). Hepburn won an Emmy
Award in 1975 for her lead role in Love Among the Ruins,
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 the greatest actress of all time. Hepburn had
a famous and longtime romance with Spencer Tracy, both on- and
off-screen. Hepburn was born in Hartford, Connecticut, to Dr. Thomas
Norval Hepburn, a successful urologist, and Katharine Houghton, a suffragette and birth control advocate,
who, along with Margaret
Sanger, helped to found the organization that became Planned
Parenthood. Hepburn's father was a staunch proponent of publicizing the
dangers of venereal
disease in a time when such things were not discussed, and her mother
campaigned for birth control and equal rights for women. 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. 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, which is now held up as
an exemplar of screwball comedy.
When Hepburn was young, she found her older brother Tom, whom she idolized,
hanging from the rafters by a rope, dead of an apparent suicide. Her family denied that it was self-inflicted,
arguing that he had been a happy boy; rather, they insisted that it must have
been an experimentation gone awry. Hepburn was devastated by his death, and for
years used his birthday as her own. It was not until she wrote her
autobiography, Me: Stories of
my Life, that Hepburn revealed her true birth date.
She was educated at Bryn Mawr College, receiving a degree in history and
philosophy in 1928, the same year she
debuted 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 called "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 remarried. Although the marriage
was a failure, Hepburn often expressed her gratitude toward Ludlow for his
financial and moral support in the early days of her career. 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
suddenly fired the play's original leading lady 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 from the play, 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 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 leaping down 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.
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, launching her film
career aside legendary actor John Barrymore and director George Cukor, who would
become a lifetime friend and colleague. 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. Off-set,
Hepburn, who had begun to attract significant press attention, would wear overalls and ratty tennis shoes instead of
glamorous clothing fit for a starlet, prompting RKO executives to confiscate her
overalls when she refused to change her wardrobe. After RKO refused to return
her clothing, Hepburn followed through with her threat to walk across the studio
lot in her underwear in full view of several cameras. Embarrassed, the RKO
executives confiscated all the photographs and gave her back her overalls.
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 — an Oscar followed by a smash hit at the box
office — Hepburn felt it time to make her 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 movie 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. Generally considered a flop, Hepburn's acting in The Lake
resulted in 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 foray into comedy with the films Bringing Up Baby
and Stage Door was
well-received critically. But audience response to the two films was tepid, and
the good reviews from 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). Her career began to decline. 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. 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." 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.
She could also be prickly with fans — though she relented as she aged, in her
early career Hepburn often denied requests for autographs, feeling it an invasion of her privacy. On
the set she was saddled with the label "difficult to work with", an attitude
that earned her the nickname "Katharine of Arrogance" among directors and crew.
Soon audiences began staying away from her movies.
Hepburn was already reeling from a devastating series of earlier 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. In 1939, Hepburn was offered the
part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind. However
she (and David O. Selznick) insisted that she did not have the lustful, sexual
appeal that the part needed. Hepburn said she would be a backup for the part if
no one could be found. The night before the deadline, Selznick finally cast Vivien Leigh.
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 movie version of his play Holiday. She played spoiled socialite
Tracy Lord to rave reviews. With the help of Howard Hughes, who at one time had been her
lover, she purchased the rights to the play and turned it into a hit movie. She
was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her work in the movie, in which she
appeared with Cary Grant and
James
Stewart. She enhanced James Stewart's performance; in turn he received his
only Oscar. Her career was revived almost overnight. In 1942, Hepburn made her first
appearance opposite Spencer
Tracy in Woman of the Year. Behind the scenes the
pair fell in love, beginning what would be one of Hollywood's most famous
romances.
They are one of Hollywood's most recognizable pairs both on-screen and off,
and have in large part become the standard by which other film romances are
judged. Hepburn, with her agile mind and New England brogue, complemented
Tracy's easy working-class machismo. Tracy seemed to be the only one Hepburn
would allow to tame her. When Joseph Mankiewicz introduced them, 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."
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