Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003) was an American actress of film, television and stage.
Acclaimed throughout her 73-year career, Hepburn holds the record for the most Best Actress Oscar wins with four, from 12 nominations. Hepburn won an Emmy Award in 1976 for her lead role in Love Among the Ruins, and was nominated for four other Emmys and two Tony Awards. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Hepburn as the greatest female star in the history of American cinema.[1]
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[edit] Biography
[edit] Early years
Hepburn was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of suffragist Katharine Houghton Hepburn (an heiress to the Corning Glass fortune) (née Houghton) and Dr. Thomas Horval Hepburn, who was a successful urologist from Virginia with Maryland roots. She is of English ancestry from both sides of her family.
Hepburn's father insisted the girls do swimming, riding, golf and tennis. Hepburn, eager to please her father, won a bronze medal for figure skating from the Madison Square Garden skating club, shot golf in the low eighties and reached 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 April 3, 1921, while visiting friends in Greenwich Village, Hepburn found her older brother Tom (born November 8, 1905), whom she idolized, hanging from the rafters of the attic by a rope, dead of an apparent Greenwich Village. Her family denied it was self-inflicted, arguing he had been a happy boy. They insisted it must have been an experimentation gone awry. It has been speculated he was trying to carry out a trick he saw in a play with Katharine. Hepburn was devastated and sank into a depression. She shied away from other children and was mostly home-schooled. For many years she used Tom's birthday (November 8) as her own. It was not until she wrote her autobiography, Me: Stories of my Life, that Hepburn revealed her true birth date.
Hepburn was educated at the Kingswood-Oxford Day School in West Hartford, Connecticut, before going on to Bryn Mawr College. While at Bryn Mawr, Hepburn was suspended for breaking curfew and smoking, which at that time was particularly not encouraged for women. Decades later, Hepburn also confirmed that after dark, she would go swimming naked in the college's "Cloisters" fountain (see Bryn Mawr College). She received a degree in history and philosophy in 1928 [2], 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 marriage to socialite businessman Ludlow ("Luddy") Ogden Smith, whom she 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. 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 beach home when the 1938 New England Hurricane struck and destroyed her house. Hepburn narrowly escaped death before the home was washed away over the cliffs. She stated in her 1991 book entitled 'Me' that she lost 95% ofher belongings in the storm, including her 1932 best actress Oscar, which was later found intact.
[edit] Film
After the audience reaction to A Bill of Divorcement, RKO signed Hepburn to a new contract. But her nonconformist, anti-Hollywood behavior offscreen made studio executives fret she would never become a superstar. The following year (1933), Hepburn won her first Oscar for best actress in Morning Glory, playing a young actress who rejects romance in favor of her career. That same year, Hepburn played Jo in the screen adaptation of Little Women, which broke box-office records.
Intoxicated by 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. 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.
Katharine Hepburn would often come to interviews dressed in men's suits, saying that it was comfortable. Without meaning to, she made a fashion statement, and women who admired her started wearing trousers, which wasn't encouraged at the time.
[edit] Books
- Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind (1987)
- Me: Stories of My Life (1991)
[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
- Me: Stories of My Life, Katharine Hepburn, Knopf, 1991.
- Kate Remembered, A. Scott Berg, Putnam, 2003.
- Tracy and Hepburn, Garson Kanin, Viking, 1971.
- Kate, Charles Higham, W. W. Norton, 1975.
- Knowing Hepburn, James Prideaux, 1996.
[edit] External links
- BBC Obituary
- An Uncommon Woman: Katharine Hepburn (article from Premiere magazine)
- Katharine Hepburn Online Unofficial fansite with photo gallery.
- Katharine Hepburn at Classic Movie Favorites Tribute site: galleries, bio, filmography and more.
- "Hepburn, Revisited" by William Mann in the New York Times, May 12, 2007
- The Shelf: 100th Anniversary Tribute
Categories: American atheists | American film actors | American memoirists | American stage actors | American television actors | Best Actress Academy Award winners | Emmy Award winners | English Americans | Feminist artists | Hollywood Walk of Fame | Kennedy Center honorees | People from Connecticut | People from Hartford, Connecticut | Burials at Cedar Hill Cemetery (Hartford, Connecticut)
