- Hepburn, Katharine Houghton
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▪ 2004American actress (b. May 12, 1907, Hartford, Conn.—d. June 29, 2003, Old Saybrook, Conn.), was an extremely talented performer who exhibited a unique strength, spirit, style, and independence both in her performances and in her everyday life, attributes that gained her worldwide popularity and made her a role model for women for decades. Although Dorothy Parker was famously quoted as having claimed that a Hepburn performance “ran the gamut of emotions from A to B,” Hepburn was widely considered one of the finest actresses of all time; during her more than 60-year career, she was nominated for 12 Academy Awards and won a record 4 as best actress, and many of her films came to be regarded as classics. Following her graduation (1928) from Bryn Mawr (Pa.) College, Hepburn began her performing career with small stage roles, and she played her first Broadway lead—in The Warrior's Husband—in 1932, the same year she made her film debut in A Bill of Divorcement. She won her first Oscar for her third film, Morning Glory (1933), but a Broadway flop and a series of unsuccessful films—including the now-classic Stage Door (1937) and Bringing Up Baby (1938)—threatened to derail her career. Undaunted, she made the film Holiday (1938) and returned to Broadway in a play that was written by that film's author, Philip Barry, and whose main character was modeled on Hepburn, The Philadelphia Story. She also starred in the film version (1940); it was a hit; and her career was back on track. In 1942 she costarred with Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year and found the love of her life. Although they never married—he was already married, unhappily, but because he was a strict Roman Catholic, he would not divorce—they lived together until his death in 1967. Their onscreen relationship also endured in such films as Adam's Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), the last of which garnered Hepburn a second Oscar. Among her other outstanding performances were those in The African Queen (1952), Summertime (1955), The Rainmaker (1956), Long Day's Journey into Night (1962), The Lion in Winter (1968), for which she won her third Oscar, and On Golden Pond (1981), for which she won her fourth. Hepburn also continued her stage career—with such plays as Coco (1969), A Matter of Gravity (1976), and The West Side Waltz (1981) among her credits—and made several television appearances, notably in The Glass Menagerie (1973) and Love Among the Ruins (1975). She acted in motion pictures and in television films until the mid-1990s. In 1999 the American Film Institute proclaimed Hepburn the all-time number one female American screen legend.
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Universalium. 2010.