A fiery Scots-Yankee known for her intelligence, humor and iron determination, Katharine Hepburn demonstrated remarkable staying power in a screen career that spanned more than six decades, winning three of her four Best Actress Oscars after the age of 60. Credit must go to her extraordinary parents, a noted urologist father, who at great professional risk brought the facts about venereal disease to a wider public, and his dedicated suffragette wife (an early champion of birth control), for providing an eccentric and genteel upbringing stressing Spartan physical discipline. Out of their Connecticut crucible emerged a strong-minded, outspoken, original who would become one of the nation's most admired and beloved actresses. Hepburn did it more on brains than beauty, though she was certainly not unattractive, and her strength of character, high moral fiber and regal poise were enduring qualities that continued to bring her choice parts as she aged.
After graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1928, Hepburn embarked on a stage career, making her professional debut as a lady-in-waiting in a Baltimore stock production of "The Czarina". By November of 1928 she was attracting attention on Broadway as a wealthy schoolgirl in "These Days", but her next few years on the boards passed relatively uneventfully except for her penchant for clashing with directors and crews, resulting in her dismissal from projects. It was an updating of "Lysistrata", Broadway's "The Warrior's Husband" (1932), that led to a film contract with RKO, and Typhoon Kate blew into Hollywood, intent on turning it on its ear, alienating almost everyone with her arrogance. Despite thinking her antics "subcollegiate idiotic", director George Cukor cast Hepburn in her first film, "A Bill of Divorcement" (1932), and his great discovery would pay back his trust and generosity in a collaboration encompassing eight features and two TV-movies, containing some of her finest work for the screen.
The young Hepburn was a creature of enormous imaginative potency and showy breeding, whose magically compelling performance as a stage-struck young girl in her third movie, "Morning Glory" (1933), brought her the first of her four Oscars (in a record 12 nominations). Some of her early roles in pictures like Cukor's "Little Women" (1933) and Gregory La Cava's "Stage Door" (1937), both depicting women in mutually supportive relationships, anticipated feminist concerns. Cukor's "Sylvia Scarlett" (1936), in which Hepburn disguises herself as a boy throughout most of the movie, was perhaps the most notable early example of the androgyny that runs through Hepburn's career and a groundbreaking film for its undermining of socially constructed norms of femininity and masculinity. It also teamed her with Cary Grant for the first time, though it would remain for Howard Hawks ("Bringing Up Baby") and Cukor ("Holiday") to develop their on-screen chemistry more fully in their 1938 movies.
Following the success of "Morning Glory" and "Little Women", Hepburn crashed and burned in "Spitfire" (1934), miscast as an Ozark mountain hillbilly, and returned to Broadway in "The Lake" (also 1934), her performance inspiring the famous Dorothy Parker quip: "Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." Brilliant as an aspiring but poor small-town woman in "Alice Adams" (1935), her first of three films with George Stevens, Hepburn then made a string of unpopular films, not righting herself until Stevens' "Quality Street" (1937), though it did not appreciably change her luck at the box office. Her studio was at pains to know how to market her. Neither "Stage Door", which had put her competitiveness to such fine use as part of an ensemble cast of superb actresses, nor the wonderful, screwball comedy "Bringing Up Baby", featuring Grant and Hepburn in top form, made the first-run profits expected of them. In an effort to salvage her career, she bought out her contract from RKO rather than appear in a woefully unsuitable film, "Mother Carey's Chickens".
Hepburn resurrected her career with the help of playwright Philip Barry, acquiring the film rights to his play "Holiday" and selling the package, complete with Cukor, to Columbia. She was back in her best form and type of role for the 1938 picture, soaring as the unconventional patrician daughter who ultimately lands a most compatible Grant, and, on the wings of that success, commissioned a new play from Barry, played it on Broadway and then wrapped it up for MGM with herself and Cukor. Adding Jimmy Stewart and Grant for good measure, "The Philadelphia Story" (1940) made a very heady mixture indeed, winning Stewart an Oscar and all but erasing the label of 'box office poison' which had dogged Hepburn at the end of the 30s. The film showcased her remarkable charm and vitality, even as it attributed her famed rebelliousness to the acts of an icy, spoiled socialite who learns warmth by eventually being punished and tamed. She also acted in Barry's "Without Love" on Broadway in 1942 and in the 1945 film adaptation opposite Spencer Tracy.
It was Cukor who initiated Hepburn's long association with Tracy, casting her opposite him in "Keeper of the Flame" (1942). Like Grant, he provided a strong man against whom she could test her mettle, her challenge was the spark igniting romance, and this self-assertion in the face of male domination appealed to female audiences. In many films her vigorous persona, with its vocal eccentricities and powerful physical presence, made her seem more male than female, "one of the boys", and Tracy, the most solidly masculine of all Hollywood actors (at least onscreen), could act securely as a foil to Hepburn's feminist struggles. In spite of role reversals such as those in Stevens' "Woman of the Year" (1942), the Hepburn-Tracy films end invariably on a "Taming of the Shrew" note, but they are full of scenes depicting Tracy's admiration for Hepburn's intelligence (as in "Adam's Rib" 1949) or natural athletic ability (as in "Pat and Mike" 1952). The charged dynamism of this relationship between equals, rare in Hollywood films of the 40s and 50s, would become even rarer later.
With "The African Queen" (1951), Hepburn began a series of roles as perverse or odd spinsters or women in need of a man, even as they maintained a certain aloofness and independence. She found success and Academy Award nominations in several of these films, including "Summertime" (1955), "The Rainmaker" (1956) and "Suddenly, Last Summer" (1959), and would later assume the guise for the lesser likes of "The Madwoman of Chaillot" (1969) and opposite John Wayne in "Rooster Cogburn" (1975). Stage work, too, whether in a 1952 London adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's "The Millionairess" or a strange but delightful turn in a Broadway musical, "Coco" (1969, as Coco Chanel), capitalized on this image of the eccentric but high-flying individualist. She also appeased her passion for Shakespeare between 1950 and 1960, appearing in noteworthy stage productions of "The Merchant of Venice", "Much Ado About Nothing", "Twelfth Night" and "Anthony and Cleopatra", among others, although it's a pity she didn't attempt her Rosalind in "As You like It" earlier than 1950, the part so perfect for the young Kate whose emotional flame burned so bright.
Hepburn gave perhaps the performance of her career as the drug-addicted Mary Tyrone in Sidney Lumet's memorable screen version of O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962)", her first film in three years. It would be another five before she would go before the cameras again as she devoted herself to helping Tracy's wife care for the ailing actor. Although Hepburn never married him, Tracy was the love of her life, and it was their pairing, both in the marvelous, tender and warm comedies on screen and during their 25-year affair, that made her New England rebelliousness most acceptable. Fortunately, his health improved sufficiently to allow them a swan song, Stanley Kramer's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967), and anyone who has ever seen their final scene together has no doubt of her deep and abiding love for the man who would die shortly after the production wrapped. Kramer's lens captured some of the rawest, realest emotion of Hepburn's career, resulting in her second Oscar.
Her stellar work in the juicy theatrics of "The Lion in Winter" (1968) and in the sentimental nostalgia of "On Golden Pond" (1981) brought her two more Best Actress Academy Awards. There are, however, those who consider her best acting of this later period to be in the TV films she made with Cukor, "Love Among the Ruins" (ABC, 1975), in which she gave an Emmy-winning performance opposite Laurence Olivier, and to a lesser degree, "The Corn Is Green" (CBS, 1979). Hepburn continued working intermittently through the 80s and 90s in various TV-movies, including "Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry" (CBS, 1986), "The Man Upstairs" (CBS, 1992) and "This Can't Be Love" (CBS, 1994) and returned to features with "Love Affair" (1994), providing a much-needed spark to the moribund remake of "An Affair to Remember" as Warren Beatty's feisty aunt. That same year, she made her last screen appearance, lighting up the NBC movie "One Christmas", from the Truman Capote story. Creating a character for Hepburn that was not in Capote's source material, screenwriter Duane Poole wrote a sequence reminiscent of Tracy's final soliloquy in "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", allowing her to essentially sum up her life, in the event it turned out to be her last scene on film, which--other than a few documentary cameos--it was.
The prototype of today's professional woman, Hepburn consciously chose at an early age "to live as a man" rather than marry and have children (her brief marriage with Ludlow Ogden Smith not withstanding). Driven by a desire for fame, she maintained firm control over her career, blending life and art in the creation of an actress and woman of spectacular integrity. "Katharine Hepburn has always played herself" is anything but a derogatory comment. Her screen persona, reflecting her virtues and beliefs, is far more interesting than any character she could have pretended to be. All the seasons of Katharine Hepburn have radiated a gallant mixture of individuality and femininity, from the springtime of Jo in "Little Women" to winter's Ethel Thayer in "On Golden Pond", and the capture of her indomitable spirit on celluloid leaves a stunning legacy for future film buffs to marvel at arguably the most interesting, difficult, challenging woman in the history of American pictures.