30 Years of Brilliance: 1930-1959
Katharine Hepburn holds the record for most number of Oscars won. Her career as a leading lady spanned seven decades, over fifty quality films (running the gamut from screwball comedies and romances to high drama), and twelve Oscar nominations (another record) and four Oscars, three of them after the age of sixty.
She formed memorable screen partnerships with the likes of Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy and director George Cukor but outlasted all of them and excelled just as easily on her own. Her position on the AFI list of Movie Actresses? Number One.
She was educated at the Kingswood-Oxford School before going on to attend Bryn Mawr College, where it was rumored she was expelled for smoking and breaking curfew, receiving a degree in history and philosophy in 1928, the same year she had her debut on Broadway after landing a bit part in Night Hostess. Also in 1928, while living in New York, she married Ludlow Ogden Smith. The marriage didn't last too long and they were divorced in 1934. Katharine often expressed her gratitude toward Ludlow for his financial and moral support in the early days of her career and "Luddy" continued to be a lifelong friend to her and the Hepburn family.
After several summers of acting in stock company productions, in 1932, Hepburn landed the role of Antiope the Amazon princess in The Warrior's Husband (an update of Lysistrata), which required her to wear a very short costume and debuted to excellent reviews.She became the talk of New York City, and came to the attention of the big Hollywood studios.
In her first major film, A Bill of Divorcement, Hepburn managed to upstage John Barrymore and was immediately a star. Her studio, RKO, put her straight to work: 14 films in the next six years. A year after Divorcement, she played the ingenue Eve Lovelace, a young, determined stage-struck girl, in New York City, who wants to become the "finest actress in the world" in Morning Glory and won her first Oscar. That same year (1933), Hepburn played Jo in the screen adaptation of Little Women, which broke box-office records.
In 1935, in the title role of the film Alice Adams, Hepburn earned her second Oscar nomination and by 1938 she was a bona fide star. 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. She went back to Broadway in 1938 with a part written especially for her in Philip Barry's The Philadelphia Story. Certain of a hit, she bought the film rights to the play; thus, when it ended up a success, she was able to negotiate her way back into Hollywood on her own terms, including her choice of director (George Cukor) and co-stars (James Stewart and Cary Grant). Produced by MGM in 1940, the film version was a box-office triumph, she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her work and her career was revived almost overnight.
After several years of off-and-on films, Hepburn scored another marked success with 1951's The African Queen, for which she received her fifth Best Actress nomination, losing to Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire She played a prim spinster missionary in Africa who convinces Humphrey Bogart's character, a hard-drinking riverboat captain, to use his boat to attack a German ship.
From the early 50's on she played a number of parts similar to the The African Queen in such films as Summertime, The Rainmaker and Suddenly, Last Summer. She also received Oscar nominations for these films.
Katharine made few films in the 60's. She received her ninth Oscar nomination for Long Day's Journey into Night and during this decade made her last film with Spencer Tracy Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967 for which she received yet another Oscar nomination and won. She also won for her portrayal in The Lion in Winter.
Katharine then spent much of the seventies in TV fare such as Love Among the Ruins, with Laurence Olivier, a movie which earned them both Emmys. She continued to work despite her deteriorating health, and she won a fourth Oscar for 1981's On Golden Pond.
She wrote her autobiography, "Me, Stories of My Life" in 1991 and did a TV film about her life based on this book.
Into her nineties and on the threshold of her tenth decade, Katharine Hepburn remained the consummate personality, actress, and star.
On June 29, 2003 she died of natural causes in Old Saybrook, Connetticut. She was 96.
