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Monday 7 December 2015

Katharine Hepburn, Spirited Actress, Dies at 96

Katharine Hepburn, the actress whose independent life and strong-willed movie characters made her a role model for generations of women and a beloved heroine to filmgoers for more than 60 years, died yesterday at her home in the Fenwick section of Old Saybrook, Conn. She was 96 and also had a home in Manhattan. 

Her physical presence was distinctive, her often-imitated voice filled with the vowels of a well-bred New Englander, and her sharp-planed face defined by remarkably high cheekbones. In her youth she did not have classical leading-lady looks, but a handsome beauty. In old age she was a familiar figure with her hair, gradually changing from auburn to gray, always in a topknot and her boyish figure always in the trousers that she helped to make fashionable. 

She played sharp-witted, sophisticated women with an ease that suggested that there was a thin line between the movie role and the off-screen personality. The romantic comedy "The Philadelphia Story" and the screwball classic "Bringing Up Baby" were among her best, most typical roles. But through 43 films and dozens of stage and television appearances, she played comic and dramatic parts as varied as Jo in "Little Women," the reborn spinster Rosie in "The African Queen" and Eleanor of Aquitaine in "The Lion in Winter." 

Her life and career were dominated by her love affair with Spencer Tracy, which created one of the great romantic legends and brilliant movie pairings of their day. Tracy was unhappily married and the father of two when they met, and he remained married until the end of his life. He and Miss Hepburn lived together for 27 years, until his death in 1967, and made nine films together. 
 
"Woman of the Year," "Adam's Rib" and "Pat and Mike" are typically bright and biting Tracy-Hepburn collaborations. She is wickedly smart, slightly aloof and emotionally vulnerable. He is commonsensical, down-to-earth and deeply decent. He manages to bring her down a peg; she never minds. 

Hepburn and Tracy, Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times , "so beautifully complemented each other" that their relationship "never seemed to be a matter of capitulation." Rather, he added, it was "a matter of understanding and acknowledging each other's boundaries." 

The frisson of their off-screen romance, always hinted at but never acknowledged during his lifetime, followed them on screen and became especially poignant when they played a married couple in their last movie together, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." Tracy died just 17 days after they had finished filming it. 

Through most of her career, Miss Hepburn had a reputation for being private and elusive with the press. In fact, she frequently granted interviews, although she was reticent about her personal life. But after the death of Tracy's wife, Louise, in 1983, Miss Hepburn felt free to discuss the love affair. 

In later years she spoke openly about her life and career, especially in her 1991 autobiography, "Me: Stories of My Life" (Alfred A. Knopf). Although admittedly sketchy rather than a comprehensive memoir, the book captured the qualities that endeared Miss Hepburn to audiences: a conversational tone, a no-nonsense attitude and disarming candor. The autobiography became a best seller, a tribute to her enduring appeal across generational lines. 

In 1993 she appeared in an autobiographical television documentary, "Katharine Hepburn: All About Me," made for the TNT cable network. She began: "So this is about Katharine Hepburn, public, private. Can you tell which is which?" She added, laughing, "Sometimes I wonder myself." 

Longing to Be a Boy 

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born into a close family whose comfortable social status and unconventional opinions fostered self-confidence and independence. Her father, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, was a Hartford surgeon and a pioneer in fighting venereal disease. Her mother, Katharine Houghton, was a suffragist and a strong advocate of birth control. 

In "Me," Miss Hepburn finally revealed her age. "I was born May 12, 1907," she wrote, "despite everything I may have said to the contrary." For years she had said she was two years younger and had given her birthday as Nov. 8. That was the birthday of her older brother, Tom, who died at 16. Miss Hepburn, then 14, found his body hanging from the rafters of a house the family was visiting in New York City. The Hepburns said they never knew whether he had committed suicide and left open the possibility that he had been practicing a magic trick. 

Although the family always called her Kathy or Kath, one summer Miss Hepburn so hated being a little girl that she cut her hair and called herself Jimmy. "I thought being a girl was really the bunk," she said in an interview. "But there's no bunk about Jimmy." 

After graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1928, she had small parts in stock theater companies. She was dismissed from more than one play when she was starting out, but she retained supreme self-confidence. Late in life, she laughingly said of her younger self, "I am terribly afraid I just assumed I'd be famous." 

She was first noticed professionally in her role as Antiope in the play "The Warrior's Husband," a Greek fable in which she entered by descending a narrow staircase, carrying a stag over her shoulder.
That role led to a Hollywood screen test and her first film role, as John Barrymore's daughter in "A Bill of Divorcement" (1932). It was directed by George Cukor, who become one of her dearest friends (she and Tracy lived for years in the guest house on Cukor's Hollywood estate) and the director of many of her films, including "Little Women." He once recalled of her screen test: "She was unlike anybody I'd ever seen or heard. I was rather moved by the test, although the performance wasn't that good. But I thought, `That girl is rather interesting.' " 

Fast Rise to Stardom 

Miss Hepburn became a movie star quickly. She won an Academy Award for her role as Eva Lovelace, the naĂŻve aspiring actress who learns a tough lesson about survival, in the 1933 film "Morning Glory," only her third movie. Over the years she was nominated for a dozen Oscars, more than any other actress, a record unbeaten until Meryl Streep received her 13th this year. Miss Hepburn won three more, for "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," "The Lion in Winter" and "On Golden Pond," but never showed up to collect any of them. 

When she was 84, she looked back at those early days and, with her trademark tough-mindedness, said: "In the beginning I had money; I wasn't a poor little thing. I don't know what I would have done if I'd had to come to New York and get a job as a waiter or something like that. I think I'm a success, but I had every advantage; I should have been." 

She also credited her husband with helping her get started in her career. For most of her life, the public thought she had never married. In fact, in 1928 she married Ludlow Ogden Smith, a member of a wealthy Pennsylvania family. She immediately made him change his name to S. Ogden Ludlow, partly because she didn't want to be known as Kate Smith. 

They led separate lives long before their divorce in 1934, but they remained friendly. The town house they bought together in the Turtle Bay section of Manhattan was Miss Hepburn's home until the end of her life (along with the family home on the Connecticut River, to which she returned often). 

In later years she expressed regret at the way she had treated her husband. In an interview that echoed what she wrote in "Me," she assumed a self-chastising, no-nonsense tone and said she had been "an absolute pig with Luddy, absolute pig." She continued: "He was an angel. I thought of myself first, and that's a pig, isn't it?" 

"I would have been terrified alone in New York City," she said. "We bought this house in '31, and then the minute I won the Academy Award, I got rid of Luddy." Many years later, not long before he died, "I tried to make up to him for the horror I had caused him," she added. "He was so generous-spirited that I don't think he considered it horror. He just considered it a kid who was wildly ambitious or something." 

Miss Hepburn is survived by a brother, Dr. Robert H. Hepburn, and a sister, Margaret H. Perry, both of Canton, Conn.; four nieces; and nine nephews. 

Trousers as a Trademark 

Despite her early success, reviewers in those days sometimes found her strident and mannered. In 1933 she returned to Broadway in a spectacular failure, "The Lake," which inspired Dorothy Parker to write her famous aphorism, "She ran the gamut of emotion from A to B." 

Of those early years, she said: "I strike people as peculiar in some way, although I don't quite understand why. Of course, I have an angular face, an angular body and, I suppose, an angular personality, which jabs into people." 

Over time her screen presence softened and became more likable; meanwhile, society was catching up to her willful, independent style. She had been wearing pants, then considered quite unladylike, since the 1930's. 

In her 1993 television autobiography, she recalled: "I realized long ago that skirts are hopeless. Anytime I hear a man say he prefers a woman in a skirt, I say: `Try one. Try a skirt.' " Although her choice was based on comfort, her trademark trousered look became so influential that the Council of Fashion Designers of America gave her a lifetime achievement award in 1986. 

Many of her early films are now regarded as classics. Playing a tough, determined actress in "Stage Door" (1937), she read a line from a play — "The calla lilies are in bloom again" — that became the all-time favorite of Hepburn impersonators. Life magazine said that "Stage Door" proved that she was "potentially, the screen's greatest actress." 

She played a free-spirited heiress in "Bringing Up Baby" (1938), opposite Cary Grant and a leopard. But the film, now treasured, was a box-office flop, and by then her career was in decline. In 1938 she appeared on a list of actors labeled "box-office poison" in a poll of movie exhibitors. 

Rather than appear in a film called "Mother Carey's Chickens," she bought out her contract with R.K.O. She made "Holiday," another classic romantic comedy with Grant, in which she was another high-spirited socialite. 

Then Miss Hepburn took charge of her career in a way few women dared in those days of the studio system. Philip Barry wrote the play "The Philadelphia Story" for her, modeling his heroine, Tracy Lord, on Miss Hepburn. Tracy Lord is a beautiful, high-spirited rich woman, about to marry her second husband, when her first husband and a reporter who is covering the wedding arrive to create an unexpected romantic tangle. 

The play was a hit, and Miss Hepburn owned the rights to it because Howard Hughes, a sometime beau, had bought them for her. She went to Louis B. Mayer, the head of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, and sold him the property on the condition that she play the lead. She chose her friend George Cukor to direct. And she asked for Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable as her co-stars. She got Cary Grant as her former husband, James Stewart as the reporter, and a hit movie. She never lost control of her career again. 

Soon she went back to Mayer with another script, "Woman of the Year," the story of the unlikely romance between a hotshot political columnist and a sportswriter. She asked for Tracy, whom she had never met, to play the sportswriter. This time she got him. 

A Loving Partnership 

The success of "Woman of the Year" (1942) and the stars' off-screen relationship led to other Tracy and Hepburn films that followed a similar pattern. In "Adam's Rib" (1949), they are married, opposing lawyers, both nicknamed Pinky. In "Pat and Mike" (1952), she is a champion athlete, and he is her rough-hewn manager, with whom she falls in love. 

The film was devised to show off Miss Hepburn's well-cultivated athletic ability. Almost to the end of her life she played tennis and swam, and in earlier years she golfed. 

It was in "Pat and Mike" that Tracy spoke the often-quoted line about Miss Hepburn's figure, "Not much meat on her, but what's there is `cherce.' " 

Miss Hepburn often said Tracy was the best actor she had ever known and compared him in complimentary terms to a baked potato: solid, substantial stuff. "He's meat and potatoes, meat and potatoes," she would say. "I'm more like a fancy French dessert, I'm a little bit fancy, aren't I? But I wish I were meat and potatoes." Her other films with Tracy included the political dramas "Keeper of the Flame" (1942) and "State of the Union" (1948). 

One of her most enduring films without Tracy was "The African Queen" (1952), in which she played the straitlaced Rosie opposite Humphrey Bogart for the director John Huston. 

She wrote about it in her first book, published in 1987, whose title captures the direct, colloquial style of her writing: "The Making of the African Queen: Or, How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind" (Knopf). 

Later she achieved one of her great artistic triumphs in an unlikely role, as the 12th-century Eleanor of Aquitaine in "The Lion in Winter" (1968). There was still something of the typical Hepburn persona in the steely manipulation and breaking heart of the aging, dismissed queen, but none of the actress's contemporary mannerisms. 

Her versatility lasted well into her career. She played the distraught, drug-addicted Mary Tyrone in the 1962 film of Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey Into Night." She was a fair match in toughness for John Wayne in the western "Rooster Cogburn" (1975). And in "On Golden Pond" (1981) she starred opposite Henry Fonda as a feisty older woman coping with her husband's failing memory and insisting that they should go on and live life to the fullest. In that role, the on-screen and off-screen Hepburn seemed to meld as easily as they had in her youth. 

Her final screen appearance, in 1994, was a minor but tremendously emotional role in "Love Affair." Playing Warren Beatty's wise old aunt, she gave advice to the woman he loved, played by Annette Bening. Miss Hepburn's age gave the role the trappings of a farewell to movies, but if she moved more slowly than before, in demeanor she was as game and modern as she had ever been, even venturing an unprintable line about ducks. 

Throughout her career, she returned to the stage periodically. She appeared in "The Millionairess," by George Bernard Shaw, on Broadway in 1952. In the late 1950's she also appeared in several Shakespeare plays in Stratford, Conn. 

And in 1969, when she was 62, she made her singing debut on Broadway in the Alan Jay Lerner musical "Coco," based on the life of the fashion designer Coco Chanel. She also appeared on Broadway in 1976 in "A Matter of Gravity," by Enid Bagnold, and in 1981 in "The West Side Waltz," by Ernest Thompson, who had written "On Golden Pond." 

Her performances in all three of these plays were received with dazzling praise; the works themselves were treated more harshly. Walter Kerr of The New York Times wrote about her performance in "The West Side Waltz" in terms that reflected the general critical opinion: "One mysterious thing she has learned to do is breathe unchallengeable life into lifeless lines." 

A Beloved Aunt on TV 

In the 1970's she acted in television movies, including the Edwardian romantic drama "Love Among the Ruins" (1975), with Laurence Olivier, and "The Corn Is Green" (1979), both directed by Cukor. And in later years she kept busy with minor television movies. 

She played a fictional version of the typically feisty Kate Hepburn character in "Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry" (1986), "Laura Lansing Slept Here" (1988) and "The Man Upstairs" (1992). 

In 1994 she appeared in a few scenes in the television movie "One Christmas," as yet another wise old aunt. Her tailor-made Hepburn lines included these: "I've always lived my life exactly as I wanted. I wouldn't change a single thing. No regrets." 

As she aged, she had some physical problems from which she recovered well. She had hip-replacement surgery and operations on both her shoulders, but she remained spry. Although her head shook visibly in television interviews from the 1980's on, she vehemently denied the rumor that she had Parkinson's disease, saying she had inherited her shaking head from her grandfather Hepburn. 

Her most striking television appearance was not in a dramatic role, but in a 1986 tribute to Spencer Tracy. Speaking openly about their relationship at last, she read a letter she had written to him, which she later included in her autobiography. She recalled their last years together, when he was ill and had trouble sleeping, and she would sit on the floor by his side and talk. She wondered why he drank.
"What was it, Spense?" she asked. It was an eloquent and sentimental performance that distilled the way her public and private lives blended. 

At the conclusion of "All About Me," her own television biography, she said: "In some ways I've lived my life as a man, made my own decisions. I've been as terrified as the next person, but you've got to keep a-going; you've got to dream." In typical Katharine Hepburn style, she faced the camera and, at the age of 85, tacitly acknowledged how close she had to be to the end. 

"I have no fear of death," she said. "Must be wonderful, like a long sleep. But let's face it: it's how you live that really counts."

Katharine the great



Katharine Hepburn
Picture: AFP
Katharine Hepburn.
The great Hollywood director Frank Capra once said: "There are actresses and actresses ? and then there is Hepburn." Bart Barnes recalls the life and times of the American legend who died on Sunday, aged 96.

Katharine Hepburn was an actress of breathtaking talent and unsurpassed durability. In a film and stage career that spanned more than five decades, she became a popular legend to millions.

Hepburn won four Academy Awards for acting, more than anyone, and she was nominated for eight others. Her Oscars for best actress were spread across a 48-year period from 1933 to 1981.

The first was for Morning Glory, in which Hepburn played a small-town New England girl who conquers the New York stage. The last was for On Golden Pond, a poignant drama in which she played� 69-year-old Ethel Thayer, caring for her ailing husband of� 50 years in the twilight of their life together, as they revisit the summer vacation home of their youth.

The others came for 1968's The Lion in Winter, in which she was King Henry II's ageing and troubled queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine; and for 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, where Hepburn and Spencer Tracy played a white liberal couple whose daughter brings home her black fiance.

That was the last of nine films in which Hepburn and Tracy played opposite each other. Off the screen, they had a warm and enduring personal relationship that began with their first film together, Woman of the Year, in 1942, after Tracy and his wife had separated. But he took the Catholic Church's admonition against divorce seriously. Although Hepburn and Tracy were frequent companions for 25 years, they never married or lived together openly, and they booked separate hotel suites when travelling together. He died soon after Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was released.


Over the years, Hepburn's theatrical roles ranged from such Shakespearean stage heroines as Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra to the society girl Tracy Lord in the film and play The Philadelphia Story.

She proved herself to be one of the great tragediennes of the screen in Eugene O'Neill's autobiographical Long Day's Journey into Night, a� 1962 film in which she played the tormented and drug-addicted Mary Tyrone, based on the author's mother. Many critics thought that to have been her finest role.

Unlike most of the motion picture industry's leading actresses of the 1930s and 1940s, Hepburn's artistic stature did not decline as she aged. If anything, it improved, and she continued to play opposite top actors and command the best scripts even into her 70s.

Neither beautiful nor sexy by conventional Hollywood standards, Hepburn had what she once described as an "angular face and body, and I suppose an angular personality". She had freckles and copper-reddish hair and a voice that Tallulah Bankhead said sounded like "nickels dropping in a slot machine".
 
But there was a mystique about her and a style and presence on the stage and screen that her fans found electric and captivating, and she could infuse the most ordinary of acts with drama and meaning.

Her first film director, George Cukor, spotted this quality in Hepburn's initial screen test simply by the way in which she bent down, picked up a glass of champagne from the floor, then turned and faced the camera. She had a sensitivity to the camera unlike anyone else he'd seen, said Cukor, who would direct Hepburn in films, off and on, for the next 50 years. David O. Selznick, the executive producer of her first movie, Bill of Divorcement in 1932, found her stunning in one of the film's early scenes when all she did was walk into a room, stretch out her arms and lie down in front of a fireplace.
 
Tennessee Williams said she was "a playwright's dream � a dream actress" after seeing her performance as the rich and possessive Violet Venable in the 1959 film version of his play Suddenly Last Summer, which also produced an Oscar nomination for Hepburn.

Frank Capra, the great Hollywood director, once said: "There are actresses and actresses � then there is Hepburn."

In all, she appeared in 42 films, and there was always a lively debate among her followers over which of her roles was the best. Long Day's Journey into Night and her four Oscar-winning pictures were among the perennial favorites, as was The African Queen, a� 1951 movie based on a novel by C.S.Forester.

In that film Hepburn played the part of Rose Sayer, a proper and middle-aged British spinster who falls in love with a gin-swilling, ne'er-do-well riverboat pilot, played by Humphrey Bogart, in German East Africa during the early years of World War I.

The African Queen marked a major turning point in Hepburn's career. Until then she had been known primarily for roles in which she played intelligent, independent, well-bred, well-connected and well-off young women. Her later roles tended to be more serious than those early in her career, and she was often cast as a middle-aged or elderly woman attempting to cope with a variety of cares and problems.
 
She shunned television until late in her career, then in 1975 won an Emmy Award for best actress for Love Among the Ruins, an Edwardian comedy about a former Shakespearean actress who is sued for breach of promise by a young man whose marriage proposal she had accepted. She played opposite Laurence Olivier, whose performance won an Emmy for best actor.

As a young Hollywood actress, Hepburn was often at odds with the major film studios, which disliked the fact that she would accept only the roles that suited her. She had an independent spirit that led some producers and directors to view her as "an ornery, opinionated snob". She never had a press agent, she often refused to co-operate with film studio publicists, and for years she did not grant media interviews.

If the bulb of a camera flashed from the audience when Hepburn was on the live stage, she would often stop the performance, deliver a sharp tongue-lashing to the miscreant and then begin the scene over again.

In her manner of dress, she was equally unconventional. Her customary attire was a turtleneck sweater, men's trousers and an odd black hat, and it often appeared that much of her clothing was 20 or 30 years old. The Council of Fashion Designers of America gave her an award in 1986 for demonstrating "what American fashion was all about even before any of us thought of designing it".
Hepburn's response: "Imagine, the original bag lady getting an award for the way she dresses."

A physical fitness enthusiast, she often played tennis before breakfast, swam outdoors regularly, even in the winter, and whenever possible rode a bicycle instead of riding in a car. She was once the runner-up in the Connecticut women's golf championship

She was often imperious, both on stage and off, but she could also be sensitive and considerate of others. In the summer of 1980, when On Golden Pond was being filmed at Big Squam Lake, New Hampshire, she became concerned that the activity might disturb the region's regular summer residents.

One day she walked over to the cottage nearest to where the movie was being filmed. "I'm Katharine Hepburn. We're making a movie next door, and I hope we're not ruining your summer," she told the startled occupants.

Her first movie role opposite Spencer Tracy came in 1942 in Woman of the Year and it brought a fourth Oscar nomination. In that film, Hepburn was Tess Harding, a smart, sophisticated but cold newspaper columnist who is humanised by Tracy, as the newspaper's down-to-earth sports editor.

At 170 centimetres, with high heels and a hairstyle that made her look even taller, Hepburn appeared at their first meeting to tower over the 175-centimetre Tracy. "I'm afraid I am a little tall for you, Mr Tracy," she is said to have observed at their first meeting on the set of Woman of the Year.

"Don't worry, Miss Hepburn," Tracy is reported to have answered. "I'll cut you down to my size."
There was an electricity and a rapport between them that was soon apparent to others on the movie set, and it would delight millions of moviegoers for the next 25 years.

Off the screen they were together often, if not constantly. Hepburn wrote daily letters to Tracy during a 10-week period in the jungles of what then was the Belgian Congo while filming The African Queen.

Over the years she tried to encourage and support Tracy in his frequent battles with alcoholism, and when his health began to fail in the mid-1960s she reduced her own professional commitments substantially in order to care for him.

"I have had 20 years of perfect companionship with a man among men," she said of Tracy in a 1963 interview.

After his 1967 death, Hepburn resumed an energetic and ambitious acting career, although afflicted with a palsy that made her head shake, and it was during this period that she recorded some of her finest performances.

The year after On Golden Pond, she did a play that also dealt with problems of growing old, West Side Waltz, in which she played an elderly pianist. The part required her to learn to play a piano well enough to look realistic at it on stage while the theatre sound system played the music on tape.

Two years later, she starred in a movie, The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley, a comedy about an elderly woman who hires a professional hit man to eliminate her ageing contemporaries who have lost interest in living.

Well into her 70s, she could easily have retired, but she preferred not to. "Work is the only thing that ever made anyone happy," she once said. "The notion that work is a burden is a terrible mistake."

Katharine Hepburn American actress

Katharine Hepburn, in full Katharine Houghton Hepburn   (born May 12, 1907Hartford, Conn., U.S.—died June 29, 2003Old Saybrook, Conn.), indomitable American stage and film actress, known as a spirited performer with a touch of eccentricity. She introduced into her roles a strength of character previously considered to be undesirable in Hollywood leading ladies. As an actress she was noted for her brisk upper-class New England accent and tomboyish beauty.

Hepburn’s father was a wealthy and prominent Connecticut surgeon, and her mother was a leader in the woman suffrage movement. From early childhood, Hepburn was continually encouraged to expand her intellectual horizons, speak nothing but the truth, and keep herself in top physical condition at all times. She would apply all of these ingrained values to her acting career, which began in earnest after her graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1928. After scoring her first major Broadway success in The Warrior’s Husband (1932), she was invited to Hollywood by RKO Radio Pictures.

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory [Credit: Courtesy of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.]

Hepburn was an unlikely Hollywood star. Possessing a distinctive speech pattern and an abundance of quirky mannerisms, she earned unqualified praise from her admirers and unmerciful criticism from her detractors. Unabashedly outspoken and iconoclastic, she did as she pleased, refusing to grant interviews, wearing casual clothes at a time when actresses were expected to exude glamour 24 hours a day, and openly clashing with her more experienced coworkers whenever they failed to meet her standards. She nonetheless made an impressive movie debut in A Bill of Divorcement (1932) and went on to win an Academy Award for her third film, Morning Glory (1933). Her much-publicized return to Broadway, in The Lake (1933), proved to be a flop. And while moviegoers enjoyed Hepburn’s performances in homespun entertainments such as Little Women (1933) and Alice Adams (1935), they were largely resistant to historical vehicles such as Mary of Scotland (1936), A Woman Rebels (1936), and Quality Street (1937). Hepburn recovered some lost ground with her sparkling performances in the comedies Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Holiday (1938), but it was too late: a group of leading film exhibitors had already written off Hepburn as “box office poison.”

Hepburn, Katharine: Stewart, Grant, and Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story” [Credit: © 1940 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.; photograph from a private collection]

Undaunted, Hepburn accepted a role written specifically for her in Philip Barry’s 1938 Broadway comedy The Philadelphia Story, which proved to be a hit. She purchased the motion picture rights to the play and was able to jump-start her Hollywood career by starring in the 1940 film version. She continued to make periodic returns to the stage (notably as the title character in the 1969 Broadway musical Coco), but Hepburn remained essentially a film actor for the remainder of her career. Her stature increased as she chalked up such cinematic triumphs as The African Queen (1951), Summertime (1955), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962). She won a second Academy Award for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), a third for The Lion in Winter (1968), and an unprecedented fourth Oscar for On Golden Pond (1981); her 12 Academy Award nominations also set a record, which stood until 2003, when broken by Meryl Streep. In addition, Hepburn appeared frequently on television in the 1970s and ’80s. She was nominated for an Emmy Award for her memorable portrayal of Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1973), and she won the award for her performance opposite Laurence Olivier in Love Among the Ruins (1975), which reunited her with her favourite director, George Cukor. Though hampered by a progressive neurological disease, she was nonetheless still active in the early ’90s, appearing prominently in films such as Love Affair (1994) and writing several volumes of memoirs, including her autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life (1991).

“State of the Union”: still with Hepburn and Tracy [Credit: © 1948 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.; photograph from a private collection]

Hepburn was married once, to Philadelphia broker Ludlow Ogden Smith, but the union was dissolved in 1934. While filming Woman of the Year in 1942, she began an enduring, intimate relationship with her costar, Spencer Tracy, with whom she would appear in films such as Adam’s Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952). Tracy and Hepburn never married—he was Roman Catholic and would not divorce his wife—but they remained close both personally and professionally until his death in 1967, just days after completing the filming of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Hepburn had suspended her own career for nearly five years to nurse Tracy through what turned out to be his final illness. In 1999 the American Film Institute named Hepburn the top female American screen legend of all time.

The Rise and Fall of Katharine Hepburn's Fake Accent

When Hollywood turned to talkies, it created a not-quite-British, not-quite-American style of speaking that has all but disappeared.



 
Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. (MGM)
"Play it, Sam. Play 'As Time Goes By,'" purrs a moon-faced Ingrid Bergman in the now-famous scene from 1942's Casablanca. Staccato t's and accordion-stretched a's lend a musical flavor to Bergman's lilt. "Early" becomes "euh-ly" and "perhaps" unfolds as "peuh-haps.'"

The grandeur and glamor in her voice, though, is a sham.

No, really. That's not a real accent. It's a now-abandoned affectation from the period that saw the rise of matinee idols and Hitchcock's blonde bombshells. Talk like that today and be the butt of jokes (see Frasier). But in the '30s and '40s, there are almost no films in which the characters don't speak with this faux-British elocution—a hybrid of Britain's Received Pronunciation and standard American English as it exists today. It's called Mid-Atlantic English (not to be confused with local accents of the Eastern seaboard), a name that describes a birthplace halfway between Britain and America. Learned in aristocratic finishing schools or taught for use in theater to the Bergmans and Hepburns who were carefully groomed in the studio system, it was class for the masses, doled out through motion pictures.
There are many theories as to how it became any sort of standard. The most probable being that when the silent film era was bulldozed for the early talkies, so too were those films' famous faces, on account of their indecent sets of pipes. Silent movie star Gloria Swanson once notoriously quipped: "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces." Expression was paramount, and actress Clara Bow was master. Bow was born in a run-down tenement in old Brooklyn and withstood a dizzy ascent to stardom in films like It (1927) and Wings (1927). Her morose pout and slanted eyes took Paramount straight to the bank. People paid to ogle her. When she heard her voice recorded for the first time, she was appalled. "I hate talkies," she said in Elizabeth Goldbeck's The Real Clara Bow, "they're stiff and limiting. You lose a lot of your cuteness, because there's no chance for action, and action is the most important thing to me." In The Wild Party (1929), for take after take Bow's eyes would shift nervously to the microphone overhead, calling for another take.

This newfound pressure would ultimately lead to a downfall only Hollywood could trigger. Bow, crushed under the pressures of fame and work, was admitted to a sanatorium in 1930. At 25, her career was finished. But talkies didn't need Clara Bow.

Whether or not this transition from speechless to speech was a catalyst for an industry standard, Edith Skinner's Speak With Distinction—first published in 1942—crowned the high-society accent theater's common tongue. Skinner, born in New Brunswick, Canada, was a voice coach and consultant to Broadway actors. After studying phonetics at Columbia University, she began to assist Margaret Prendergast McLean, a leading stage-speech consultant. She soon gained a national reputation, becoming the go-to instructor for all things speech and diction.
"Your voice expresses you," Skinner once told The Milwaukee Journal. "You don't want to lose that individual voice God gave you. What I try to do is get rid of the most obvious regionalisms, the accent that says, 'you're from here and I'm from there,' the kind of speech that tells you what street you grew up on."

Katharine Hepburn's society burr was a perfect example of the Mid-Atlantic accent. "Come round about noon, tomorrow," Hepburn trills in The Philadelphia Story (1940), a full-bodied pronunciation that turned her "o's" into "ooh's" that tumbled from her mouth, a modulation honed by her acclaimed New York dramatic coach Frances Robinson-Duff. Hepburn sought her out after being fired from her first production in 1928, when she insisted on hurriedly bleating out her lines. In a 1935 New Yorker article, a profile on Duff's diaphragmatic methods reveals a bit more about Hepburn's deficiency: "Miss Hepburn neglected the Duff fundamentals. Moreover, having been in Hollywood and away from regular instruction, Miss Hepburn had allowed her diaphragm to drift. When she returned East to do 'The Lake,' it was maladjusted and her jaws and tongue were unfree ... But Miss Hepburn has character. She immediately returned to Miss Duff and the fundamentals."

The drift away from these "fundamentals" resulted in a potpourri of speech on the silver screen. Katharine Hepburn's put-on timbre is a higher percentage American than British. It's quite similar to that of Claudette Colbert's slightly harsher "r" in It Happened One Night (1934). Where the accent vastly differs is among men. Cary Grant, often said to be the blueprint of Mid-Atlantic English, was actually born in Britain. He came to America at the age of 16 as a stilt walker for the Bob Pender Stage Troupe, but abandoned his troupe after their two-year tour to stay on in America and pursue an acting career. This transatlantic trajectory resulted in an accent that couldn't be pinned to a map. It was of nowhere in particular, but rather handsome all the same. Strange, then, that other famed male actors at the time—Jimmy Stewart and Humphrey Bogart—had wildly unencumbered manners of speaking. Their accents were very much their own: the former's a rural dialect of Pennsylvania; the latter's a spin on a regional New York accent.

So how did the accent die? Thanks in part to these sharp-tongued headliners like Bogart, Americans began to see themselves better reflected in film. The Mid-Atlantic accent was very much in vogue until its abrupt decline post-World War II. Taught in finishing schools and society parlors, the accent had become common to off-screen America. But more people spoke as they do today, with regionally developed accents like Boston Brahmin or Locust Valley Lockjaw. The rejection of Mid-Atlantic was also a rejection of classicism. Highfalutin figures in American society who luxuriated in the vernacular were edged out by the everyman. "This idealization of the linguistic behavior of upper class Americans continued, in some Hollywood films, up to the late '40s and '50s," says Dr. Marko Modiano, senior lecturer in English studies at Gävle University. "It lost its position with the rise of a new generation of film stars who, like everyone else, were moving more and more toward the kind of neutral American English which we hear today in the US."

Rita Moreno, who started off on stage in Singin' In the Rain and later on screen in West Side Story (1961), told NPR, "I became the house ethnic. That meant that I had to play anything that was not American. So I became this gypsy girl, or I was a Polynesian girl, or an Egyptian girl. Finally, I decided by playing all these roles, I should have some kind of accent. But of course, I had no idea what these people sounded like, so I made up my own." What Moreno didn't realize is that her "ethnic" accent already existed, or at least, what she used as a foundation did. It was Mid-Atlantic English with ethnic injections and clipped delivery.

Nowadays, ethnic injections are only the result of behind-the-scenes training. Social media's ability to mass-ridicule a crummy rendition of a foreign accent means that speech coaches are written into contracts. Barbara Berkery helped concoct Johnny Depp's inebriated mumble for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which has ruefully seeped into Depp's subsequent roles (The Rum Diary, The Lone Ranger). And just to confuse things, Brits have spurned typecasting for the role of butler and are increasingly putting on American accents to win over US markets. Henry Cavill, the Channel Islands chap who plays Superman in this summer's Man of Steel, did some heavy lifting to affect a Midwest manner of speech. "Doing an accent is like going into the gym for a workout," he tells Collider. "If you pick up the heaviest weight possible and try and clean and press it, you're going to pull something." For Emma Watson's Calabasas caw in The Bling Ring, she marathoned through several seasons of Keeping Up With the Kardashians to match the sisters' vocal fry.

Marathon as they might, though, few of today's actors will ever need to perfect a widely heard but invented dialect. Mid-Atlantic English defined an era on screen by lending films an escapist, more-refined-than-reality allure. As Hollywood's golden age was ushered out, the accent went with it.
Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart's romantic spat in The Philadelphia Story offered a metaphorical damnation of the high-society cinema accent. "Shut up. Shut up. Oh, Mike, keep talking. Keep talking. Talk, will you?" Hepburn pleads. To which Jimmy Stewart's character soberly states, "No, no, I've... I've stopped." And so, too, did Mid-Atlantic English.

Katharine Hepburn Biography


Katharine Hepburn was a spirited and eccentric actress who appeared in such classic films as 'The African Queen,' 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' and 'On Golden Pond.'





Katharine Hepburn - Mini Biography (TV-PG; 3:30) Katharine Hepburn became an unlikely Hollywood star with her wit, and outspokenness. Her career spanned over 7 decades and included the hits "The Philadelphia Story" and "The African Queen." She won four Academy Awards for Best Actress.

Synopsis

Born on May 12, 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut, Katharine Hepburn became an unlikely Hollywood star in the 1930s with her beauty, wit, and the eccentric strength with which she imbued each character in a career that lasted more than six decades.




Early Life

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born May 12, 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut, to Katharine Martha Houghton, a suffrage activist, and Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, a urologist who sought to educate the public about the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. A liberal-minded family, the Hepburns encouraged young Katharine to speak out, sharpen her mind and engage with the world as fully as possible. The Hepburns' happy family life took a tragic in 1921, however, when Katharine made the horrifying discovery of her older brother, Tom, dead, hanging from the ceiling of his room. The loss of her beloved brother completely debilitated Katharine. For years, she withdrew almost entirely those around her, for a time even adopting Tom's birthday (November 8) as her own.

Fortunately for filmgoers everywhere, Katharine Hepburn overcame this great tragedy of her childhood to become one of the most enduring legends in cinema history. Over the course of more than six decades in Hollywood, she earned twelve Academy Award nominations and won an unprecedented four Best Actress Oscars.

Becoming a Star

While attending the all-women's Bryn Mawr College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Katharine Hepburn fell in love with acting. After graduating from the school in 1928 with a degree in history, she spent the next several years acting in plays in and around New York, appearing in productions both on and off Broadway. She got her big break into screen acting when an RKO Radio Pictures talent scout spotted her in a Broadway performance and offered her an audition for a role starring opposite John Barrymore in the 1932 film A Bill of Divorcement. Hepburn got the part and never looked back.

A Bill of Divorcement became a hit, and RKO offered Hepburn a lucrative long-term contract to make films for the studio. Hepburn won the first of her four Academy Awards just a year later, for her performance in Morning Glory, opposite Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Adolphe Menjou. Soon after, her performance as Jo in the hit big-screen adaptation of the beloved Louis May Alcott novel Little Women won her great acclaim, and Hepburn became known throughout the world as a formidable onscreen presence with a fierce intelligence unique among actresses of her stature.

Unconventional Attitude

Over time, though, in spite of Katharine Hepburn's huge acting talent and range, Hollywood began to question her unconventional attitude and strong personality. She refused to play the traditional offscreen role of the Hollywood starlet, choosing not to wear makeup at all times, give interviews or bask in the glow of media attention. When the costume department at RKO stole her slacks (because they found slacks to be uncouth and boyish), Hepburn walked around the studio in her underwear, refusing to put her clothes on until she got her pants back. "If you obey all the rules," she said, "you miss all the fun." A true artist and an unlikely Hollywood star, she continued to flee media attention and fame for most of her life: "Once a crowd chased me for an autograph. 'Beat it,' I said, 'go sit on a tack!' 'We made you,' they said. 'Like hell you did,' I told them."

Big Moves

Though Hepburn made a series of popular comedies in the late 1930s (the most notable being Bringing Up Baby in 1938, opposite Cary Grant), she also appeared in a handful of flops, and producers began to label her "box-office poison." Sensing trouble, Hepburn ended her contract at RKO and returned to the stage.

Back on Broadway, Hepburn appeared as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, winning huge acclaim. Playwright Philip Barry had written the role specifically with Hepburn in mind, and critics and audiences alike went wild over the production. Hepburn bought the motion picture rights to the story and headed back to Hollywood, where she sold them to MGM on the condition that she would star in the film. With this move, she single-handedly regenerated her film career and her mass appeal. The 1940 film, starring Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart alongside Hepburn, earned multiple Academy Award nominations.

Unwed Romance

Hepburn's next life-changing move was the beginning of her enduring onscreen and offscreen relationship with the actor Spencer Tracy. Woman of the Year (1942), the first of nine films the duo would make together, was a huge smash. Tracy and Hepburn shared a palpable, electric chemistry on the screen and off it. The pair fell deeply in love while making their first film together; their relationship lasted 27 years, even though Tracy was already married and refused to divorce his estranged wife. Hepburn and Tracy's unwed romance had its ups and downs, but Hepburn put her career on hold for five years beginning in 1962 to nurse Tracy through the illness that would ultimately take his life in 1967, just days after the pair completed their last film together, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Hepburn won another Oscar for her role in the film but always viewed it more as the Academy's tribute to her lost love.

Legacy

Hepburn's Best Actress Oscar for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner had plenty of company in the trophy case. Over the course of her long and prolific career, she made dozens of films and garnered a stunning twelve Academy Award nominations, winning four. Her credits include many of the most celebrated pictures of all time: The Philadelphia Story (1940), The African Queen (1951), Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), On Golden Pond (1981). She stole the stage from all the leading men of her era, including Spencer Tracy, of course, but also Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, Humphrey Bogart, Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier, to name a few.

In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her the top American screen legend of all time.
In the 1990s, Katharine Hepburn developed a progressive neurological disease, but this did not prevent her from keeping up an active lifestyle in her Connecticut hometown and even from acting in select roles. Her last Hollywood film credit came in 1994, more than 60 years after she made her memorable debut in A Bill of Divorcement. Katharine Hepburn died on June 29, 2003, at the age of 96 in the same house in which she had grown up. "Life is hard," she once said. "After all, it kills you."

Katharine Hepburn

Hepburn, Katharine

HEPBURN, Katharine



Nationality: American. Born: Katharine Houghton Hepburn in Hartford, Connecticut, 9 November 1907 (or 1909). Education: Attended West Middle School; Oxford School for Girls, Hartford; Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, 1924–28. Family: Married Ludlow Ogden Smith, 1928 (divorced 1934). Career: 1928—professional stage debut with Edwin H. Knopf's stock company, Baltimore, in The Czarina; New York debut in September under name Katharine Burns in Night Hostess; appearance on Broadway in November under own name in These Days; 1932—appearance in The Warrior's Husband led to Hollywood offers; contract with RKO; film debut in George Cukor's A Bill of Divorcement; 1934—returned to Broadway to star in The Lake; 1936–37—toured in Jane Eyre for the Theatre Guild; 1938—bought out of RKO contract rather than star in Mother Cary's Chickens; 1938—on Broadway in The Philadelphia Story (written for her by Philip Barry); 1941—teamed with Spencer Tracy for first time in Woman of the Year; 1950—on Broadway as Rosalind in As You Like It; continued through 1950s to tour in Shakespeare productions; later stage roles through the early 1980s. Awards: Best Actress, Academy Award for Morning Glory, 1932–33; Best Actress, Venice Festival, for Little Women, 1934; Best Actress, New York Film Critics, for The Philadelphia Story, 1940; Best Acting (collectively awarded), Cannes Festival, for Long Day's Journey into Night, 1962; Best Actress, Academy Awards, for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, 1967, and The Lion in Winter, 1968; Best Actress, British Academy, for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and The Lion in Winter, 1968; Best Actress, Academy Award, for On Golden Pond, 1981.

Films as Actress:

1932
A Bill of Divorcement (Cukor) (as Sydney Fairfield)
1933
Christopher Strong (Arzner) (as Lady Cynthia Darrington); Morning Glory (Sherman) (as Ada Love/"Eva Lovelace"); Little Women (Cukor) (as Jo)
1934
Spitfire (Cromwell) (as Trigger Hicks); The Little Minister (Wallace) (as Lady Babbie)
1935
Break of Hearts (Moeller) (as Constance Dane); Alice Adams (Stevens) (title role)
1936
Sylvia Scarlett (Cukor) (title role); Mary of Scotland (Ford) (title role); A Woman Rebels (Sandrich) (as Pamela Thistlewaite)
1937
Quality Street (Stevens) (as Phoebe Throssel); Stage Door (La Cava) (as Terry Randall)
1938
Bringing Up Baby (Hawks) (as Susan Vance); Holiday (Cukor) (as Linda Seton)
1940
The Philadelphia Story (Cukor) (as Tracy Lord)
1942
Woman of the Year (Stevens) (as Tess Harding)
1943
Keeper of the Flame (Cukor) (as Christine Forrest); Stage Door Canteen (Borzage) (as herself)
1944
Dragon Seed (Bucquet) (as Jade)
1945
Without Love (Bucquet) (as Jamie Rowan)
1946
Undercurrent (Minnelli) (as Ann Hamilton)
1947
The Sea of Grass (Kazan) (as Lutie Cameron); Song of Love (Brown) (as Clara Schumann)
1948
State of the Union (Capra) (as Mary Matthews)
1949
Adam's Rib (Cukor) (as Amanda Bonner)
1951
The African Queen (Huston) (as Rose Sayer)
1952
Pat and Mike (Cukor) (as Pat Pemberton)
1955
Summertime (Lean) (as Jane Hudson)
1956
The Rainmaker (Anthony) (as Lizzie)
1957
The Iron Petticoat (Thomas) (as Vinka Kovelenko); Desk Set (Walter Lang) (as Bunny Watson)
1959
Suddenly, Last Summer (Mankiewicz) (as Mrs. Violet Venable)
1962
Long Day's Journey into Night (Lumet) (as Mary Tyrone)
1967
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (Kramer) (as Christina Drayton)
1968
The Lion in Winter (Anthony Harvey) (as Eleanor of Aquitaine)
1969
The Madwoman of Chaillot (Forbes) (as Countess Aurelia)
1971
The Trojan Women (Cacoyannis) (as Hecuba)
1973
A Delicate Balance (Richardson) (as Agnes); The Glass Menagerie (Anthony Harvey—for TV) (as Amanda Wingfield)
1975
Rooster Cogburn (Millar) (as Eula Goodnight); Love among the Ruins (Cukor—for TV) (as Jessica Medlicott)
1977
Olly, Olly, Oxen Free (The Great Balloon Adventure) (Colla) (as Miss Pudd)
1978
The Corn Is Green (Cukor—for TV) (as Lilly C. Moffat)
1981
On Golden Pond (Rydell) (as Ethel Thayer)
1983
The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley (Grace Quigley) (Anthony Harvey) (title role)
1984
George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey (Stevens, Jr.)
1986
Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (Schaefer—for TV) (title role); Spencer Tracy Legacy: A Tribute by Katharine Hepburn (Heeley—for TV)
1988
Laura Lansing Slept Here (Schaefer—for TV) (title role)
1993
The Man Upstairs (Schaefer—for TV) (as Victoria Brown)
1994
Love Affair (Caron) (as Ginny); This Can't Be Love (Anthony Harvey—for TV) (as Marion Bennett); One Christmas (Tony Bill—for TV) (as Cornelia Beaumont)

Publications

By HEPBURN: books—

The Making of The African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind, London 1987.

Me, New York, 1991.

By HEPBURN: articles—

Interview with I. McAsh, in Films (London), May 1982.

"Katharine Hepburn: 'It's My Last Day of Acting,"' interview with Army Archerd, in TV Guide, 17 December 1994.

On HEPBURN: books—

Newquist, Roy, A Special Kind of Magic, New York, 1967.

Dickens, Homer, The Films of Katharine Hepburn, New York, 1971.

Kanin, Garson, Tracy and Hepburn, New York, 1971.

Huston, John, An Open Book, New York, 1972.

Marill, Alvin H., Katharine Hepburn, New York, 1973.

Rosen, Marjorie, Popcorn Venus, New York, 1973.

Higham, Charles, Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn, New York, 1975.

Wallis, Hal, and Charles Higham, Starmaker, New York, 1980.

Navarro, Marie-Louise, Katharine Hepburn dans l'objectif, Paris, 1981.

Britton, Andrew, Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1983; rev. ed., 1995.

Carey, Gary, Katharine Hepburn: A Biography, London, 1983.

Freedland, Michael, Katharine Hepburn, London, 1984.

Morley, Sheridan, Katharine Hepburn: A Celebration, London, 1984; rev. ed., 1989.

Spada, James, Hepburn: Her Life in Pictures, London, 1984.

Edwards, Anne, A Remarkable Woman: A Biography of Katharine Hepburn, New York, 1985.

Anderson, Christopher, Young Kate, New York, 1988.

Bryson, John, The Private World of Katharine Hepburn, London, 1990.

Tarshis, Lauren, Kate: The Katharine Hepburn Album, New York, 1993.

Leaming, Barbara, Katharine Hepburn, New York, 1995.

Ryan, Joal, Katherine Hepburn; A Stylish Life, New York, 1999.

On HEPBURN: articles—

Mason, G., "Katharine the Great," in Films and Filming (London), August 1956.

Tozzi, Romano, "Katharine Hepburn," in Films in Review (New York), December 1957.

Cowie, P., "Katharine Hepburn," in Films and Filming (London), June 1963.

Current Biography 1969, New York, 1969.

Bowers, R., "Hepburn since '57," in Films in Review (New York), August-September 1970.

Gilliatt, Penelope, "The Most Amicable Combatants," in New Yorker, 23 September 1972.

Phillips, Gene, "Cukor and Hepburn," in American Classic Screen (Shawnee Mission, Kansas), Fall 1979.

Crist, Judith, "Katharine Hepburn," in The Movie Star, edited by Elisabeth Weis, New York, 1981.

Watney, S., "Katharine Hepburn and the Cinema of Chastisement," in Screen (London), September/October 1985.

Cronyn, Hume, "Tracy, Hepburn, and Me," in New York Times, 15 September 1991.

McClurg, Jocelyn, "Kate on Kate," in Saturday Evening Post, January-February 1992.

Kanin, Garson, "Tracy and Hepburn," in Iskusstvo Kino (Moscow), May 1994.

Stars (Mariembourg), Summer 1995.

Radio Times (London), 13 January 1996.

Viviani, Christian, "Katharine Hepburn et George Cukor," in Positif (Paris), July-August 1996.
* * * Any account of Katharine Hepburn must necessarily be indebted to Andrew Britton's book on her, which (together with Richard Dyer's Stars) represents a significant breakthrough in attempts to deal with the star phenomenon that transcends the gossip column and career outline.

Hepburn has represented, on a number of levels, a problem that Hollywood never quite managed to solve, although it proposed a number of partial solutions. Aspects of the problem were how to publicize her; how to deal with her intransigent demands for better or different types of roles; which leading man, or type of male lead, to cast with or against her; and what sort of star vehicles to construct around her. Central to the problem is her famous rebelliousness. It is fitting that one of her 1930s films should be titled A Woman Rebels, since this characteristic was consistently expressed both by the characters she played and in her offscreen image. The rebelliousness could be used, up to a point, to construct her as an attractive identification-figure for the female viewer; but it threatened continuously to become too subversive, too radical, too incontainable. The problem Hollywood faced with Hepburn was, precisely, that of containment. This gives her career, of course, a very special interest in relation to feminism: both on and off screen, Hepburn repeatedly challenged a male-dominated social order and the male-dominated industry that is at once a part of that order and represents its structures to the general public.

Britton argues convincingly that, from a feminist viewpoint, Hepburn's most progressive work is located in the 1930s rather than in her more popular and famous later films such as The Philadelphia Story or the movies in which she was teamed with Spencer Tracy. Many of the films of this early period were explicitly concerned with a woman's rebellion against male determination; some (Little Women, Stage Door) add to this strong connotations of lesbianism, in the wider sense in which that term is now commonly used in feminist discourse: female bonding for mutual support and solidarity.
This in turn merges with strong overtones of androgyny, developed most fully in Sylvia Scarlett, in which for much of the film she is disguised as a boy. Gender, in fact, becomes a central issue when considering the Hepburn persona during this period, as the films frequently deal with (and undermine) the socially constructed norms of masculinity and femininity. It is interesting that in her first film (A Bill of Divorcement) and at all periods of her career Hepburn worked with George Cukor, producing much of her best, most responsive and vivid work in collaboration with a gay (and woman-oriented) director. She also in this period found her ideal co-star, Cary Grant. Her 1930s work culminates in two masterpieces in which they were teamed, Cukor's Holiday and Hawks's Bringing Up Baby. The Grant and Hepburn personas lent themselves with special aptness and felicity to Hawks's comedy of sexual role reversal.

The Philadelphia Story marks a watershed: it contains some of Hepburn's most brilliant and radiant moments, but ascribes her rebelliousness to the egocentricity of a spoiled socialite, the film's project being essentially her chastisement and conversion into what patriarchal culture defines as a "real woman." The teaming with Tracy is a logical next step: the rebellion, the struggle for independence, are still thematically present (Adam's Rib is perhaps the most explicitly feminist of all Hepburn's movies), but the continued expression of those drives is made more acceptable by the presence of a male co-star who represents an entirely unambiguous and irreducible "masculinity."

Of Hepburn's transition into old age, one might say that she at least retained her dignity, without the descent into exploitation horror movies suffered by Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Tallulah Bankhead. The alternative has proved, however, to be a move into the sort of "class" productions deemed respectable in middle-of-the-road bourgeois culture, and one may question whether it is really any happier a fate to spend one's old age appearing in The Lion in Winter and The Madwoman of Chaillot than in Straitjacket or Die, Die, My Darling. Hepburn's best work in this period has been, again, with George Cukor: the television movies Love among the Ruins and The Corn Is Green. On Golden Pond, a central movie of the Reagan era, finally subordinates her to the patriarchal order; yet her extraordinary vitality movingly survives.

In recent years, two biographical works have shed further light on Hepburn's background and motivation. One is an autobiography, called Me, in which she reveals her relationships with family and friends, and her need to be in control both personally and professionally. The second is Barbara Leaming's controversial tome, Katharine Hepburn, which serves to draw a very different and often unpleasant portrait of the Tracy-Hepburn relationship, and also her alleged romance with John Ford. In her late seventies and eighties, she continued acting in made-for-television movies (Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry, Laura Lansing Slept Here, The Man Upstairs, This Can't Be Love) which are rare in story content in that each focuses on an elderly woman. But she did not altogether abandon the big screen, appearing as Warren Beatty's brittle but vigorous, wise aunt in Love Affair.
 
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