Hollywood has created and presented many stars over the years, but only the greatest of them become legends. Among the legends, there have been great beauties and great talents, but none of them can really be said to be in the league of Katharine Hepburn, for she is a lady in a class by herself. Hers is the most distinguished career in the history of movies.
Born in Connecticut, Kate Hepburn set out at an early age to become the finest actress in the business. Following a number of appearances on the theatrical stage, she headed for Hollywood, and in 1932 landed her first film role, in A Bill of Divorcement, opposite John Barrymore. The following year she portrayed an aspiring actress in Morning Glory, for which she won her first Academy Award as Best Actress. That triumph was followed by Little Women, 1933, Alice Adams, 1935, Stage Door, 1936, and other light romances and melodramas, culminating in three classic comedies made with Cary Grant: Bringing Up Baby, 1937, Holiday, 1938, and The Philadelphia Story, 1940, in which James Stewart costarred.
In the next year she played Woman of the Year, which initiated a long costarring association with Spencer Tracy, with whom she would complete Keeper of the Flame, 1943, Without Love, 1945, State of the Union, 1948, Adam's Rib, 1949, Pat and Mike, 1952, and The Desk Set, 1957. The 1950s also saw memorable performances with other leading men, such as Humphery Bogart in The African Queen, 1951, Burt Lancaster in The Rainmaker, 1956, and Montgomery Clift in Tennessee Williams' Suddenly, Last Summer, 1958, costarring Elizabeth Taylor.
Another great American play, Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, costarring Sir Ralph Richardson, ushered in her fourth decade in film and brought yet another of her dozen Best Actress Oscar nominations. Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? 1967, Spencer Tracy's last film, won her her second Oscar, and The Lion in Winter, 1968, with Peter O'Toole, her third. The 1970s led to playing opposite Sir Laurence Olivier in Love Among the Ruins, 1974 (a televised film directed by the late George Cukor, her close friend throughout her movie career), and John Wayne in Rooster Cogburn, 1975. The 1980s found her with Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, for which she was awarded her fourth Oscar. Even today this extraordinarily lovely and gifted actress looks for new scripts and approaches her work with the freshness and openness to be expected of an aspiring ingenue.
Though you might imagine that the legendary Katharine Hepburn is in real life the fiery maverick she so vividly portrayed in those many film classics, she is in fact neither imperious nor flamboyant in person. Instead, this most gracious grande dame of stage and screen is delicate and modest, at once down-to-earth in her manner and noble in her bearing, a living incarnation of America at her finest. Her words may be sharp, and her wit keen, but her smile is sweet, and her gaze benevolent. In those lucid, luminous eyes, ice-blue oceans of wisdom, one can see the enormous courage that has sustained the most remarkable career in film history, as well as a profound sensitivity perhaps not quite so well known.
To get to know the ultimate living legend is to find one's attraction to her refined sensibility, intimate style, and buoyant sense of humor turning into a deep respect, for here is a lady of honor and integrity, a magnetic star who sheds her own light. The admiration she so universally
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