Katharine Hepburn (12 May 1907 – June 2003)

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Biography

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born on 12 May 1907 in Hartford, Connecticut. She was the second of six children in a family that treated physical courage, intellectual independence, and public argument as ordinary parts of life.

Her father, Thomas Norval Hepburn, was a prominent urologist and surgeon who campaigned against venereal disease. Her mother, Katharine Martha Houghton Hepburn, was a suffragist, a campaigner for access to birth control, and president of the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association.

Her parents shared both a commitment to social reform and the same philosophy in raising their children: that son and daughter alike should be free, in body and mind.

The Hepburn children swam, sailed, climbed trees, played tennis, and tested themselves against one another. Katharine was lean, competitive, and impatient with the restrictions placed on girls.

The young Hepburn loved swimming, golfing, and watching movies every week before performing them for neighbors. But she also forced herself to do things she disliked, if she believed she needed to do them: she took ice-cold baths every morning.

At about nine, she cut her hair short and asked to be called Jimmy. The experiment was partly play and partly declaration. Long before Hollywood turned her independence into a public image, she had begun shaping a self that did not depend on conventional ideas of femininity.

Her closest companion was her brother, Thomas Houghton Hepburn, two years older than her. In 1921, while the two were staying at the New York home of a family friend, thirteen-year-old Katharine found Thomas dead from hanging.

The family maintained that the death had resulted from a failed stunt rather than suicide. Whatever its cause, the loss altered Hepburn's childhood. She withdrew from school, received much of her education at home, and for many years used her brother's birthday, 8 November, as her own.

Katharine Hepburn young, age 14

She entered Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1924. At first socially awkward and academically uncertain, she found purpose in student theater and decided that acting could contain the competitiveness, imagination, and appetite for risk that had always driven her.

Hepburn graduated in 1928 with a degree in history and philosophy. That year she joined a theatrical company in Baltimore and began pursuing stage work with a confidence that often exceeded her experience.

Her early employment was unstable. She was hired, dismissed, rehired, and repeatedly criticized for speaking too quickly. So she decided to study with the respected voice teacher Frances Robinson-Duff.

Robinson-Duff helped Hepburn develop the precise, highly projected speech that became one of her signatures. The result was not naturalistic in the modern sense. It was clipped, rhythmic, patrician, and impossible to confuse with anyone else's voice.

She did not have much chance to show off her new voice on Broadway, however. On 12 December 1928, at twenty-one years old, Hepburn married Ludlow Ogden Smith, a Philadelphia businessman she had met while still a student at Bryn Mawr.

She persuaded her husband to reverse his names from Ludlow Ogden Smith to Smith Ogden Ludlow, so that she did not have to be an ordinary Mrs. Smith, and he would be her Luddy.

Luddy supported her ambitions, but marriage could not contain them. Hepburn returned to the theater soon after the honeymoon, and the couple increasingly lived apart.

After small parts and several false starts, she attracted the serious attention of the American talent agent Leland Hayward while playing in The Warrior's Husband (play, 1932). Her entrance down a staircase with a stag over her shoulders transformed her trained athleticism into theatrical spectacle.

Hayward asked her to take a screen test for an upcoming film called A Bill of Divorcement (film, 1932), produced by RKO.

She passed the screen test and was offered the role. She asked for $1,500 a week, an audacious figure for an actress without film experience. The American producer David O. Selznick of RKO, nudged by the American director George Cukor, agreed.

Having gotten both the role and the salary she wanted, Hepburn arrived in California in July 1932. She was twenty-five years old.

Her screen debut, A Bill of Divorcement, was a success, both for the studio and for her.

From that film, she got good reviews, a long-term contract from RKO, and a lifelong friend in Cukor. He understood that Hepburn's apparent oddness was not a defect to conceal but a dramatic instrument. Over the next fifty years, the two would share a professional partnership that produced nine more films.

To the studio, Katharine Hepburn was not an ideal star. Her narrow face, high cheekbones, direct gaze, and strange, assured voice seemed unlike the rounded glamour then favored by Hollywood. Her wardrobe choices were equally resistant to the studio ideal. She favored wide, high-waisted trousers, men's shirts, sweaters, flat shoes, and jackets that allowed her to move.

Once, when RKO employees removed her dungarees in an attempt to make her wear a skirt, Hepburn walked around the studio lot in her underwear until the trousers were returned. The story endured because it was funny, but also because it expressed something essential. To Katharine Hepburn, comfort, movement, and self-command mattered more than approval.

On screen, though, she was entirely professional, with the same discipline that had once sent her into ice-cold baths as a child.

In Christopher Strong (film, 1933), Hepburn played an aviator who enters a costume party dressed as a moth. The costume designer Walter Plunkett created a body-hugging gold lamé suit with a close skullcap, metallic wings, and antennae.

The costume was heavy and became dangerously hot beneath the studio lights, requiring an added lining to protect Hepburn's skin.

Later that year, Hepburn starred in Morning Glory(1933) and won her first Academy Award. As the ambitious young actress Eva Lovelace, Hepburn transmitted the nervous electricity of a woman determined to be seen, the very qualities criticized as mannerism.

Her next film, Little Women (film, 1933), was a huge success, adapted from the 1868 novel of the same name by the American writer Louisa May Alcott. In the film, Hepburn played Jo March, a character whose audacity matched hers. Jo's impatience with polished femininity also echoed her own.

Walter Plunkett designed the film's deliberately worn costumes, adding frayed edges and patches to suggest the March family's limited means. At Hepburn's request, he based Jo's opera dress on a gown worn by her own maternal grandmother in an old family image.

The detail mattered to Hepburn. For her, performance, costume, and memory were never entirely separate.

After Little Women, Hepburn became a major film actress, but she could not forget Broadway. She wanted to prove herself on the stage as well.

She accepted a very low salary to appear in the play The Lake (1933), produced by the American theater producer Jed Harris. The Lake opened on Broadway in December and exposed the limits of her technique under an unsympathetic director. Hepburn took out $14,000, most of her life savings, paid Harris, and left.

Not long after her move from New York to California, Hepburn became involved with Leland Hayward, the agent who had found her on the Broadway stage. Both were married at the time.

Her marriage to Ludlow Ogden Smith ended in divorce in 1934, but they remained friends until his death in 1979. Hepburn later acknowledged the generosity with which he had supported her when her career mattered more to her than domestic life.

Her affair with Hayward continued for two more years. Once both were divorced, Hayward proposed to Hepburn, but she declined. Her reason, in her own words, was: "I liked the idea of being my own single self."

In 1935, she made Alice Adams (1935), in which she portrayed a girl desperate to climb the social ladder. The film earned her another Academy Award nomination.

Then, for the next few years, one commercial disappointment after another followed her.

In Sylvia Scarlett (film, 1935), she spent much of the film disguised as a boy, with cropped hair, a jacket, and trousers. The film failed on release, but its play with gender and Hepburn's ease in male clothing anticipated the androgynous appeal that later generations would recognize more readily.

The following year, she played a dizzy heiress opposite the British-American actor Cary Grant in the American director Howard Hawks's comedy Bringing Up Baby (film, 1938).

Her comedy depended on speed and physical control. Hepburn could rush a line, cross a room, stumble, recover, and continue without losing the thought underneath the movement. Her long body was not posed as decoration. It was active, tensile, and often the engine of the scene.

Bringing Up Baby disappointed at the box office, again. In May 1938, the Independent Theatre Owners Association included Hepburn among the stars it called "box-office poison." What was more, her uncooperative attitude toward the press earned her the nickname "Katharine of Arrogance."

Hepburn later admitted that her performance had become mechanical. The American writer Dorothy Parker's celebrated gibe that Hepburn had run "the gamut of emotions from A to B" attached itself to the actress's reputation.

She bought out the remainder of her RKO contract for $75,000 and returned to New York rather than accept more diminished parts.

The American playwright Philip Barry wrote a new play called The Philadelphia Story (1939), and its heroine, Tracy Lord, was created for Hepburn. She invested in the production herself, and the American billionaire Howard Hughes, her partner at the time, acquired the screen rights for her and gave them to her as a gift.

On Broadway, the Russian-American couturier Valentina Schlee dressed Tracy Lord as a woman whose elegance could look almost untouchable. The wardrobe included a green raw-silk jumpsuit, a red silk coat over a pleated white Celanese dress, and a pink wedding gown made from silk organza, chiffon, and crepe de chine.

Those clothes used Hepburn's long legs, narrow waist, and upright carriage rather than disguising them. The silhouettes were flowing but disciplined, luxurious without fuss.

On 28 March 1939, The Philadelphia Story premiered in New York and was a major success. Hollywood came knocking. Hepburn sold the film rights to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on her own terms. She would play the heroine Tracy Lord, choose the director George Cukor, and choose her co-stars, the American actor James Stewart and Cary Grant.

In 1941, while preparing Woman of the Year (film, 1942), Hepburn met the American actor Spencer Tracy. Their first meeting produced one of her best-known self-mocking remarks. Looking up at the shorter actor, she said she feared she was too tall for him, to which Tracy reportedly answered that he would soon cut her down to his size.

The film paired Hepburn's internationally celebrated political columnist with Tracy's sportswriter. Their contrasting rhythms were immediately effective. Her rapid, polished attack met his quiet, grounded restraint.

Woman of the Year was a success, for which Hepburn received a fourth Academy Award nomination.

Hepburn and Tracy began a private relationship during the film's production, one that lasted until Tracy's death. She was thirty-one; he was forty-one, and married.

Tracy had been living separately from his wife, Louise Treadwell Tracy, by the time he met Hepburn, but he never divorced her and never publicly acknowledged the relationship while he was alive.

Hepburn never spoke publicly about it and remained determined to support Tracy, who struggled with both his health and his career.

Hepburn and Tracy made nine films together. Their screen partnership repeatedly explored competition between a brilliant woman and a man unwilling to be impressed by brilliance alone.

Hepburn's clothes within these films often sharpened that contest. Structured suits, broad-shouldered jackets, tailored trousers, and crisp shirts gave her characters professional authority, while softer evening clothes revealed vulnerability without making it submissive.

The partnership continued through Keeper of the Flame (film, 1942), Without Love (film, 1945), The Sea of Grass (film, 1947), and State of the Union (film, 1948). It found one of its finest expressions in Adam's Rib (film, 1949), where they played married lawyers opposing each other in court.

Hepburn's acting style was especially suited to such verbal combat. Her clear articulation gave wit a cutting edge, while the slight artificiality of her speech allowed a character to sound as though she were composing herself even when emotion threatened to break through.

That tension became central to her mature work. Beneath the raised chin, clipped phrases, and forward stride, audiences learned to watch for the moment when certainty faltered.

During the 1940s, Hepburn's personal wardrobe settled into a lasting grammar. She wore full trousers with deep pleats, collared shirts with sleeves rolled at the forearm, simple turtlenecks, roomy jackets, flat lace-up shoes, and loafers.

Her colors were often practical and quiet: beige, white, brown, navy, and gray. Texture and cut mattered more than jewelry.

The American director George Stevens later remembered that she was never much interested in ornament away from the camera. "Kate was the first blue jeans woman," he said.

In 1951, Hepburn made her first film in Technicolor, The African Queen (film, 1951), opposite the American actor Humphrey Bogart. In the film, Hepburn played the missionary Rose Sayer, the first of many unmarried middle-aged women she would play in the decades to come, women whose discipline concealed sensuality, loneliness, and appetite for experience.

Filming in the Belgian Congo and Uganda became an ordeal of insects, contaminated water, illness, heat, and mechanical failure. Hepburn carried a full-length mirror through the jungle until it broke, then continued using the larger half.

The American director John Huston felt that her early performance was too solemn and advised her to model Rose's brave social smile on the American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Hepburn called it the best piece of direction she had ever received.

Her mud-stained high-necked blouses, long skirts, and battered hat in the film were the opposite of conventional star glamour. Yet the severe clothes made Rose's awakening more vivid because desire arrived through character rather than display.

Hepburn reunited with Spencer Tracy for another comedy, Pat and Mike (film, 1952). Written around Hepburn's real athletic abilities, the film let her play golf and tennis with the economical confidence of someone whose body had never been merely ornamental.

That was the last film Hepburn made with MGM. She took a long rest before resuming work in 1955 with the British director David Lean on Summertime (1955). In the film, she played a solitary American secretary who falls in love in Venice.

The character's neatly fitted dresses and sensible shoes gradually soften in color and feeling, while Hepburn lets yearning disturb the self-sufficiency on which the woman has built her life.

Hepburn moved between stage and screen, and her mature dramatic roles grew less dependent on charm. In Suddenly, Last Summer (film, 1959), she played the unsettling Aunt Violet Venable; Long Day's Journey into Night (film, 1962) gave Hepburn the devastating role of the morphine-dependent Mary Tyrone. In that role, Hepburn allowed her familiar gestures to lose their command. The fluttering hands, shifting voice, and distant smile became signs of a mind moving in and out of the present.

Hepburn earned an Oscar nomination for both unflattering roles.

After Long Day's Journey into Night, Hepburn stopped working to care for Spencer Tracy, whose health declined seriously during the 1960s.

Five years later, the two appeared together on screen in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It was their ninth and last film together.

On 10 June 1967, Spencer Tracy died of a heart attack, a few weeks after finishing his last scene. Hepburn did not attend the funeral, out of respect for his wife and family.

In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Hepburn's tears during Tracy's final speech were not manufactured for the scene. She later said she never watched the completed picture because the memories were too painful. Her performance in the film brought her a second Academy Award. It was also, ironically, her most successful film up to that point in her career.

The following year, she won a third for playing Eleanor of Aquitaine opposite the Irish actor Peter O'Toole in The Lion in Winter.

As Eleanor, Hepburn turned her patrician voice and bony elegance into royal weaponry. Heavy medieval robes and jeweled headdresses framed a performance built from intelligence, appetite, rage, and amused survival.

In 1969, at sixty-two, she took on the title role in the Broadway musical Coco, inspired by the life of the French couturier Gabrielle Chanel. Hepburn was not a conventional singer and had to take vocal lessons six times a week to prepare for the role, but her authority, timing, and identification with a woman of independence carried the production.

The role created a revealing circle. Hepburn and Chanel had very different visual languages, but both rejected excess, understood the authority of disciplined simplicity, and turned personal defiance into a recognizable public silhouette.

Hepburn increasingly worked in television during the 1970s. She played Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie (television film, 1973) and won an Emmy Award for Love Among the Ruins (television film, 1975), again directed by George Cukor.

Hepburn was a very private person. Off screen, she wore casual clothes, rarely appeared in public, and did not give interviews or talk to fans for much of her career. But as she aged, Hepburn became more open with the public and accepted a two-hour-long interview on The Dick Cavett Show in 1973. She never spoke publicly about her feelings for Spencer Tracy, however, until after the death of Tracy's wife.

Starting in the 1980s, Hepburn's head and hands had begun to show the familial essential tremor that became more visible with age. Viewers sometimes mistook it for Parkinson's disease, but Hepburn described it as an inherited irritation rather than a disabling illness.

She remained physically daring. In On Golden Pond(1981), filmed when she was seventy-four, she performed her own dive into the cold New Hampshire lake.

The film placed her opposite the American actor Henry Fonda, whom she had never previously met, and the American actress Jane Fonda. As Ethel Thayer, Hepburn drew on warmth, briskness, and physical vitality while allowing age to remain fully present.

The role won her fourth Academy Award for Best Actress, a record unmatched in that category. As with her previous victories, she did not attend the ceremony to collect it.

Her stage career concluded with The West Side Waltz (play, 1981–1982). By then, the tremor had become part of her visible presence, but it did not diminish the concentration with which she held a stage.

In 1985, the Council of Fashion Designers of America honored Hepburn with a Lifetime Achievement Award. The recognition acknowledged that her style had altered not only celebrity dress but also the possibilities of women's everyday clothing.

Her influence did not rest on a succession of fashionable looks. It came from consistency. Tailored beige trousers, linen jackets, natural fabrics, shirts, flat shoes, and simplicity formed a wardrobe that served the life she chose to lead.

She published The Making of The African Queen, or: How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind (book, 1987), a spirited account of the production that preserved both its discomfort and its adventure.

A few years later, she released her autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life (1991), in which she finally spoke openly about Spencer Tracy and disclosed her true birth date.

Hepburn made her final screen appearances in 1994, when she was eighty-seven years old. Her last theatrical film was Love Affair (film, 1994), with the American actor Warren Beatty and the American actress Annette Bening, and her final television performance came in One Christmas (television film, 1994).

She then withdrew to the Hepburn family home in the Fenwick section of Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her health gradually declined, showing signs of dementia in her last years.

Katharine Hepburn died at home on 29 June 2003 at the age of ninety-six, surrounded by family. Her executor described the cause as complications associated with aging.

Broadway dimmed its lights in her honor, and tributes were paid to her around the world. But the greater memorial was already visible in women who wore trousers without apology, in actresses who expected authority over their careers, and in the lean, direct elegance of a style built for movement.