Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was an American actress whose work as a leading lady on stage and screen lasted six decades. Born on May 12, 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut, she became one of the defining figures of classic Hollywood cinema and 20th-century American popular culture. She was known for headstrong independence, a spirited personality, and plain-spoken outspokenness. On screen, she often played strong-willed, sophisticated women, moving easily between screwball comedy and literary drama.

Hepburn’s record of honors was extraordinary. She won four Academy Awards for Best Actress, more than any other performer in that category, along with two British Academy Film Awards and a Primetime Emmy Award. She was also nominated for two Tony Awards, two Grammy Awards, and eight Golden Globe Awards. In 1999, the American Film Institute named her the greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema.

Her confidence was shaped early. Hepburn was the second of six children, raised by progressive parents who expected their children to think, argue, and speak freely. Her father, Thomas Norval Hepburn, was a urologist who helped establish the New England Social Hygiene Association. Her mother, Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn, was a feminist campaigner who headed the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association and later campaigned for birth control with Margaret Sanger. As a child, Hepburn joined her mother at “Votes For Women” demonstrations. She also grew up athletic, learning to swim, run, ride, wrestle, and play golf and tennis. She called herself Jimmy, cut her hair short, and developed the physical self-possession that later became part of her public image.

There was sorrow, too. At 13, Hepburn found her older brother Tom dead during a visit to New York. The incident left her nervous, moody, and suspicious of people, and she was privately tutored for a time. In 1924, she entered Bryn Mawr College, where she studied history and philosophy and began acting seriously after improving her grades enough to earn roles in college plays. A strong response to her lead performance in The Woman in the Moon helped confirm her plan to pursue the stage.

After college, Hepburn went into theater, and favorable Broadway reviews brought her to Hollywood. Her third film, Morning Glory (1933), won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. A run of commercial failures followed, ending with the admired but unsuccessful Bringing Up Baby (1938). She rebuilt her career on her own terms by buying out her RKO contract and acquiring the film rights to The Philadelphia Story, which she sold on the condition that she star in it. The film was a box office success and brought her a third Oscar nomination. In the 1940s, under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, her career centered in part on her screen partnership with Spencer Tracy, which lasted 26 years and produced nine films.

In later years, Hepburn acted in Shakespearean stage productions, literary roles, and films centered on mature, independent women, including The African Queen (1951). She won three more Best Actress Oscars for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and On Golden Pond (1981). In the 1970s, she began appearing in television films, which later became her focus, and she made her final screen appearance at 87. Hepburn died in 2003 at 96. Her words still carry force because they came from the same place as her performances: a life built around independence, argument, discipline, and refusal to fit the narrow expectations placed on women.