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Hollywood Loses Katharine Hepburn

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Sun Jun 29, 8:25 PM ET


Four-time Oscar winner Katharine Hepburn--the 20th century's most celebrated screen actress, one-half of the century's most storied offscreen love story and an enduring role model for generations of women--died Sunday afternoon. She was 96.

Cynthia McFadden, the ABC News reporter and executor of Hepburn's estate, said the actress died at 2:50 p.m. at her Connecticut home, surrounded by family and friends. Hepburn, who had been in ill health in recent years, simply succumbed to old age--an atypically quiet end to an extraordinarily feisty life. Per her wishes, there will be no funeral or memorial service.

Hepburn was the Academy Awards' gold standard. She set the record for most acting nominations, 12, a mark only eclipsed this year by Meryl Streep. And Hepburn still owns the record for acting wins, four.

Her résumé is its own classic film festival: The African Queen, The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, Little Women. Visit for more:

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She took Best Actress awards for 1933's Morning Glory, 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, 1968's The Lion in Winter and 1981's On Golden Pond. Never one for Hollywood schmoozing, Hepburn accepted not one of those Oscars in person. In fact, she attended the Academy Awards ceremony just once--in 1974--to present the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to producer Lawrence Weingarten. (And, yes, she wore pants.)

In 1999, the American Film Institute selected Hepburn as the 20th century's greatest screen actress. (Her male counterpart was Humphrey Bogart, her old African Queen shipmate.)


In all, she appeared in 58 films and TV movies. Nine of those films shared bills with Spencer Tracy, her real-life lover of 35 years.

"He was a baked potato: solid, and you can have them without salt and pepper or butter. I was a fancy dessert: mocha-chip ice cream," Hepburn once remarked of their relationship.

Onscreen, Tracy and Hepburn crackled in genre-defining romantic comedies such as Woman of the Year (1942) and Adam's Rib (1949). Their pairing guaranteed a fair-fight-style battle of the sexes. In a Tracy-Hepburn film, she wore pants, too.

Offscreen, their chemistry was just as strong. Hepburn and Tracy met on the set of Woman of the Year. He was a fortysomething, two-time Oscar winner. She was a thirtysomething, one-time Oscar winner. She wore heels at their first confab. He promised to cut her down to size.

There were complications, the biggest of which was his marriage: Tracy had a wife and two kids. Mrs. Tracy was a Catholic who didn't believe in divorce. And so, Mr. Tracy was a married man who never divorced. Not that his social life suffered.

Hepburn and Tracy were Hollywood's most married unmarried couple until his death in 1967, days after they completed work on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, the socially minded race drama that brought Tracy his ninth (and final) Best Actor Oscar nomination and Hepburn her second Best Actress statue.

While the couple's love affair was an open secret, it wasn't until playwright and friend Garson Kanin's 1971 memoir, Tracy and Hepburn, that it was definitively outed.

In later years, Hepburn broke her silence on the subject in her autobiographical books, Me (1991) and The Making of the African Queen (1987).

A prototype of the thoroughly modern "That Single Girl," Hepburn never apologized for her love of another woman's husband. She never gushed about it, either. Kate was Kate.

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born May 12, 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut, prime breeding ground for the high cheekbones and can-do-Yankeeism that were integral to her persona.

Ever blunt, Hepburn once said of her early ambition: "I didn't have any desire to be an actress or two learn how to act. I just wanted to be famous."

Apparently to help ensure success, the resourceful Hepburn slashed two and a half years off her age, passing herself off to studio execs, columnists and biographers as being born in November 1909. It was a fib she perpetuated for more than 50 years.

Of undeniable fact is that Hepburn made her film debut in 1932, in the melodrama A Bill of Divorcement. A year later, she had the Oscar for Morning Glory. But what came fast went almost as fast.

A string of flops (chiefly 1935's cross-dressing Sylvia Scarlett) and a notorious Broadway bomb (1934's The Lake, which prompted wit Dorothy Parker to crack, "Miss Hepburn runs the gamut of emotions from A to B") had her courting the dreaded "box-office poison" label.

She took her tattered career into her hands. In 1938, she bought herself out of her RKO contract rather than be forced to appear in the thespian hell that was Mother Carey's Chickens. That same year, she snapped up the film rights to her old stage hit, Holiday. With costar Cary Grant, the film became a classic of the screwball comedy form. Hepburn's bad-luck run at the box office continued unabated, however. Holiday bombed.

Undeterred, Hepburn used a similar hands-on approach with the comedy The Philadelphia Story. The role of icy socialite Tracy Lord was one she had originated on Broadway. Hepburn again purchased the film rights--and, in the process, bought herself another classic screen role.

Few films have matched Philadelphia Story's star troika of Hepburn, Grant (as the ex-husband who wants her back) and Jimmy Stewart (as the reporter who plain wants her).

Hepburn worked steadily through the early 1960s, when she declined roles to care for the increasingly frail Tracy. By the time cameras rolled on Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in 1967, she had been away from the big screen for five years.

Following Tracy's death, she returned to Broadway to unleash her distinctive, quasi-singing voice on audiences in Coco, about designer Coco Chanel. For her spunk and usual gall, she received a Tony Award nomination.

To mark her stage career, nearly as storied as her film work, the lights will dim on Broadway at 8 p.m. Tuesday in her honor.

Hepburn's work ethic never wavered. She won her fourth Oscar at age 73 for On Golden Pond, which paired her with contemporary Henry Fonda in his final film.

In the 1990s, when her famed upper-crust voice quivered under the strains of old age (but not Parkinson's disease as was widely believed), she continued to venture before the camera, mainly in TV movies but also for a big-screen cameo in 1994's An Affair to Remember remake--Love Affair, with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.

"This is the first time she has...looked small and frail," critic Roger Ebert wrote of that appearance. "Yet the magnificent spirit is still there--and the romantic fire."

Hepburn retired to her seaside retreat in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in the late 1990s, only making headlines when various ailments--including arthritis and pneumonia--sent her to the nearby hospital in Hartford. In July 2001, she endured a one-week hospiital stay for a urinary tract infection.

Hepburn was legally married just once--in 1928--to businessman Ludlow Ogden Smith. The union ended in 1934.

But there was none of this no-regrets business for Hepburn. Of regrets, she said, she had more than a few. (And if you didn't have any, she suggested, "maybe you're stupid.")

But in the end, there were at least two things Hepburn never regretted--her love for Tracy and her non-love of the media that covered the two of them, separately and together, for decades.

"Death will be a great relief," she once said. "No more interviews."