KATHARINE HEPBURN

Katharine Hepburn was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1907 to a wealthy family of good lineage. She was a very athletic tomboy as a child. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1928, and that same year had a tiny part in a Broadway play. She also married that same year, to a fellow socialite she met at college. She worked in some stock companies, and in 1932 had a substantial Broadway role, in The Warrior's Husband, and that got her a screen test for A Bill of Divorcement. She received rave reviews for that role, and the next year she won an Oscar for Morning Glory, and also played the lead in Little Women, and Alice Adams (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film). But Hepburn, while a magnificent actress, did not have much sex appeal (she often wore men's clothes, onscreen and off), and many of her later 1930s movies did poorly at the box office, and she was dubbed "box office poison". She had a major comeback in 1939 when she starred in The Philadelphia Story on Broadway (it had been written especially for her) and in the movie adaptation (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), opposite Cary Grant and James Stewart. In 1942, she made her first movie with Spencer Tracy, Woman Of The Year (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), and they had an affair (she had been divorced since 1934, and had had a much publicized romance with Howard Hughes). Tracy could not get divorced, but they lived together until he passed away in 1967, and they made many movies together. In the 1950s Hepburn, unlike most actresses, was able to keep playing romantic leads, and she made some of her better movies, including The African Queen (winner of the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), Summertime (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), Suddenly Last Summer (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), and The Rainmaker (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film). She also had many strong performances in the 1960s and 1970s, including Guess Who's Coming To Dinner (winner of the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), Long Day's Journey Into Night (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), Lion In Winter (winner of the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), and in 1981 she won an Oscar for On Golden Pond! Hepburn passed away in 2003 at the age of 96.