Hepburn, Katharine Houghton

(b. 12 May 1907 in Hartford, Connecticut; d. 29 June 2003 in Old Say-brook, Connecticut), film and stage actress known for her on-screen and off-screen independence.

Hepburn was the second of six children and the oldest girl of Thomas Norval Hepburn, a prominent urologist, and Katharine (Houghton) Hepburn, a suffragist and birth-control activist who was a member of the family that founded Corning Glass Works. Called Kath, Kathy, Kate, and Redtop (for her bright red hair) as a child, Hepburn marched in suffrage parades and met such prominent feminists as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Margaret Sanger, and Emmeline Pankhurst. Raised in a household that prized athleticism, individuality, and strong opinions, Hepburn was especially close to her older brother, Tom. As the eldest son, Tom was held to high standards by his father but had what seemed a fairly normal adolescence. On a family trip to New York in 1921 Hepburn found the sixteen-year-old Tom hanging by a rope in the third-floor room of the house of a family friend. Although all signs pointed to suicide, the family insisted the death occurred as the result of a prank gone awry.

Hepburn had a difficult time in school after her brother’s death, so her parents decided to have her tutored at home, the goal being for her to matriculate at her mother’s alma mater, Bryn Mawr College. Once at Bryn Mawr, Hepburn did not excel academically as her mother had done and felt self-conscious around her more accomplished classmates. Hepburn did, however, value how her Bryn Mawr education taught her to work hard and persevere. Several months after receiving her BA, Hepburn on 12 December 1928 abruptly married Ludlow Ogden Smith, a twenty-nine-year-old insurance broker from a wealthy Philadelphia family. “Luddy” was a sweet man who unfortunately was no match for Hepburn’s ambition and drive, and the couple divorced in 1934. Hepburn never remarried or had children, instead making personal choices that served as her slightly idiosyncratic alternative to traditional gender roles.

Rather than follow her father into medicine, Hepburn decided to try her luck on the stage. After either quitting or being fired from most of her early roles, Hepburn was cast in a 1932 Broadway play called The Warrior’s Husband, in which her striking appearance as an Amazon warrior in tights won her a Hollywood contract, launching her movie career. Hepburn immediately felt at home in front of the camera, and her early filmography contained a variety of roles. She played the upper-class daughter of a character played by John Barrymore in A Bill of Divorcement (1931), an Amelia Earhart–type aviator in Christopher Strong (1933), Jo March in Little Women (1933), an Appalachian mountain girl in Spitfire (1934), a circus performer masquerading as a boy in Sylvia Scarlett (1935), and a small-town social climber in Alice Adams (1935). Hepburn won her first of four Oscars for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her portrayal of the aspiring actress Eva Lovelace in Morning Glory (1933), which costarred Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Adolphe Menjou. Cultivating an aura of eccentricity and independence, Hepburn flouted the rules of Hollywood. It was not that she did not crave celebrity or success; she was just determined to have them her own way.

Hepburn’s sense of timing, like her personal style and dress, which included a fondness for trousers, was impeccable. The 1930s were Hollywood’s golden age and a golden age for women in the film industry. “I came along at a point in the movie industry when nothing like me had ever existed—with a loud voice and a very definite personality and a rather belligerent look.” Hepburn also had a beautiful, slim body, perfect for the camera. She was five feet, seven inches tall but seemed taller. Her athletic build and propensity for wearing pants had an undeniable impact on twentieth-century notions of beauty and style.

By the late 1930s, however, despite films such as Stage Door (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and Holiday (1938), later recognized as among her most critically acclaimed efforts, Hepburn had been labeled “box office poison” by the Independent Theatre Owners Association because of a string of movies that were commercial and popular failures.

When RKO Radio Pictures wanted to demote her to a film called Mother Carey’s Chickens (1938), Hepburn bought out her contract and returned to her family’s summer home in Old Saybrook for an extended stay. Like many actresses, Hepburn coveted the role of Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939), but it went to Vivien Leigh. Hepburn’s comeback vehicle was The Philadelphia Story (1940), the screen treatment of a play by Philip Barry, who had written the character of Tracy Lord with Hepburn in mind. Showing excellent business sense, Hepburn had acquired the screen rights to what became a hit play in 1939 and then sold to the rights to MGM. The film version, which was a box-office success, was directed by George Cukor, a favorite director with whom Hepburn made eight films, and costarred Cary Grant and James Stewart. “When Katharine Hepburn sets out to play Katharine Hepburn,” noted Life in 1940, “nobody is her equal.”

Her days of unpopularity over, Hepburn entered a new phase in her career. In the 1930s she had been romantically linked to such powerful men as Leland Hayward, John Ford, and Howard Hughes. Beginning in 1941, however, Hepburn began a long affair with Spencer Tracy that was widely known in Hollywood but never gossiped about in print. (Tracy was Catholic and unwilling to seek a divorce from his wife, who headed a nationally recognized center for deaf and hearing-impaired children and their families. The Tracys’ oldest son was deaf.) The relationship was not an easy or equal one: Hepburn often subsumed her needs to Tracy’s, regularly putting her career on hold for months to take care of Tracy and nurse him back from his recurring episodes of alcoholism. Hepburn once even spent a night sleeping on the floor outside Tracy’s Beverly Hills hotel room while he was in a drunken stupor. She later admitted that she had never really understood the demons that plagued Tracy, nor did they talk about their relationship or their feelings for each other. “I can only say I think if he hadn’t liked me, he wouldn’t have hung around. As simple as that.”

From the start the pairing of Hepburn and Tracy made for strong on-screen chemistry. Beginning with Woman of the Year (1942), in which they played a high-powered columnist modeled on Dorothy Thompson and a sportswriter caught up in an unlikely romance, Hepburn and Tracy went on to make eight more films together, including Keeper of the Flame (1942), State of the Union (1948), and Desk Set (1957). In Adam’s Rib (1949), they played married lawyers on opposite sides of a case. Pat and Mike (1952), another battle-of-the-sexes plot, featured Hepburn as an athlete (she did her own stunts) and Tracy as her manager and promoter. Hepburn also made films on her own, most notably The African Queen (1951) opposite Humphrey Bogart. Hepburn used Eleanor Roosevelt as her inspiration for the part of Rose Sayer.

Like her character in The African Queen, the typical Hepburn role in the 1950s and early 1960s was often a spinster or old maid instead of the high-spirited and independent heroines she had played in the 1930s and 1940s. In Summertime (1955), Hepburn played a middle-aged secretary who takes a trip to Venice and falls in love with a character played by Rossano Brazzi. In The Rainmaker (1956) a con artist played by Burt Lancaster awakens an old maid’s sexuality (and makes it rain) before moving on. In her fifties Hepburn began playing mothers, albeit old and dysfunctional ones, such as Mrs. Venable in Gore Vidal’s adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer (1959) and Mary Tyrone in the 1962 movie version of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night. After 1962 Hepburn stopped working and spent quiet years with Tracy before they made their final movie together, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), for which she received her second Oscar. Tracy died seventeen days after they finished shooting the film.

Hepburn was sixty years old when Tracy died, and unlike many aging Hollywood stars she continued to receive major dramatic opportunities, including The Lion in Winter (1968) with Peter O’Toole, for which Hepburn won her third Oscar, and The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969) with Charles Boyer. Hepburn also continued to perform on the Broadway stage, starring in her first musical, Coco, based on the life of the designer Coco Chanel, in 1969 and in the plays A Matter of Gravity (1976) and The West Side Waltz (1981). In 1975 Hepburn played another spinster, teaming up with John Wayne in the unlikely but highly successful western Rooster Cogburn. She also appeared on television in Love Among the Ruins (1975) and The Corn Is Green (1979), both directed by her close friend Cukor. Hepburn won her fourth Oscar playing opposite Henry Fonda in the sentimental but successful On Golden Pond (1981).

Hepburn’s stature as a legend increased as she aged. She said, “I’m like the Statue of Liberty to a lot of people. When you’ve been around so long, people identify their whole lives with you.” After Tracy died and more details became known, the relationship between Hepburn and Tracy became transformed, despite its undercurrent of devastating alcoholism, into a public love story, which became part of the Hepburn mystique.

Hepburn continued to win prestigious parts well into her seventies and for the most part avoided the demeaning late roles that hurt the reputations of actresses such as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Only the worsening of a Parkinson’s disease–like disorder, which had caused a noticeable tremor in Hepburn’s film work as far back as the 1970s, kept her from appearing in public more often. Her last film appearance was a cameo in Warren Beatty’s Love Affair (1994).

In her later years Hepburn spent as much time fanning her legend as she did acting. Formerly reclusive and hostile to the press, Hepburn started to tolerate and even relish contact, proving herself eminently quotable on a range of topics, especially the changing role of the sexes. A typical pithy comment was “Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other at all.... Perhaps they should live next door and visit every now and then.” Hepburn enjoyed the publicity surrounding the publication of The Making of “The African Queen,” or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind (1987) and Me: Stories of My Life (1991). Surrounded in her old age by a loyal staff, a small circle of devoted friends, and her longtime companion Phyllis Wilbourn, Hepburn, at the age of ninety-six, died of old age on 29 June 2003 at her family home in Old Saybrook. She is buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery, in Hartford.

Well-born, well-educated, and dressed in pants long before they became fashionable, Hepburn projected an image of confident and uncompromising individuality that was the embodiment of the independent woman. “I put on pants fifty years ago... I’ve done what I damn well wanted to and I’ve made enough money to support myself and I ain’t afraid of being alone.” Hepburn’s career and persona have had special resonance for women, but she cautioned them from making assumptions about her freedom and accomplishments: “It hasn’t been free, and I really haven’t done it all.... Maybe they have five children, and I don’t have any.” She did not see herself as typical or even as a role model for other women. Individualism remained her highest value. Hepburn’s model of self-confidence and unflinching female liberation endeared her to generations of fans. She showed that women can be autonomous and live on their own terms.

The Bryn Mawr College Archives, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, contain a small amount of archival material and clippings about Hepburn, as does the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library in Los Angeles. A. Scott Berg, Kate Remembered (2003), was written with Hepburn’s collaboration but was not published until after her death. Other biographies include Garson Kanin, Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir (1971); Anne Edwards, A Remarkable Woman: A Biography of Katharine Hepburn (1985); Christopher Anderson, Young Kate (1988); Andrew Britton, Katharine Hepburn: Star as Feminist (1995); and Barbara Leaming, Katharine Hepburn (1995). For a discussion of Hepburn’s mother’s activism, see Susan Ware, “Katharine Hepburn, Her Mother’s Daughter,” History Today (April 1990): 47–53. Obituaries are in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times (all 30 June 2003).

Susan Ware