Remembering the 4 time golden age Oscar willing film and stage actress with 12 Oscar nominations, on her 114th birth anniversary

KATHARINE HEPBURN
(May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003)

Her screen career lasted for over sixty years and was based on a persona whose essentials included energy, grace, determination and beauty.

She was perfectly cast as Jo in Cukor’s Little Women (1933), and she won her first Oscar as the young actor in Morning Glory (1933). She was dressed as a boy in parts of Cukor’s risky Sylvia Scarlett (1936). For John Ford, she gave perhaps her most romantic performance, as Mary Of Scotland (1936). In Stage Door (1937), she had wonderful battles of repartee with Ginger Rogers. Then she did three films with Cary Grant – as the spirit of liberating disruption in Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938); as the rebellious rich girl who wants a more decent life in Cukor’s Holiday (1938); and as Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story (1940), in which emotional pride and coldness give way to a deeper understanding. During her 66-year career, Hepburn appeared in 44 feature films, 8 television movies, and 33 plays. Her movie career covered a range of genres, including screwball comedies, period dramas, and adaptations of works by America’s top playwrights. She appeared on the stage in every decade from the 1920s to the 1980s, performing plays by Shakespeare and G.B.Shaw, and a Broadway musical.

She won four Academy awards as the leading lady in “Morning Glory” (1933), “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967), “The Lion in Winter” (1968), and “On Golden Pond “(1981).

But if one film was the pivot of Hepburn’s popularity, it was The African Queen (1951), where she and Humphrey Bogart made a salty, romantic coupling, like kids let out to play. On that dangerous African location, she won the love and admiration of director John Huston, by hunting with him and generally roughing it. In return, years later, in her book about the film, she described him as a pagan god.

Katharine Hepburn won numerous awards besides her Oscars. In 1999, Hepburn was named by the American Film Institute as the greatest female star of Classic Hollywood Cinema.