Katharine Hepburn
From Philosopedia
Hepburn, Katharine (12 May 1907 - 29 June 2003)
Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Hepburn was the tomboy daughter of a urologist and a suffragette. She studied at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, made her acting debut in Baltimore in 1928, then played John Barrymore’s daughter in The Warrior’s Husband on Broadway in 1932. From 1932 on, she received international acclaim for her roles as a character actress with a distinctive New England manner of speaking.
Her outstanding films have been Morning Glory (1933, received an Oscar); Woman of the Year (1942, the start of a 25-year professional and personal relationship with co-star Spencer Tracy); The African Queen (1952); Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967); The Lion in Winter (1968); and On Golden Pond (1981).
On Broadway in the 1950s she played Shakespearean roles and was in Coco (1969).
On television she is remembered for her roles in The Glass Menagerie (1973); Love Among the Ruins (1975); and Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry (1986).
- I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for each other.
Hepburn told the above to a reporter for Ladies’ Home Journal. The Academy Award actress, whose name was often coupled with Spencer Tracy’s, added,
- I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.
A biography by Barbara Leaming, Katharine Hepburn (1995), reports that when thirteen Hepburn discovered the body of her fifteen-year-old brother, Tom, who had slowly strangled himself with a noose. Leaming wrote further:
- The Hepburns - candid about sex and all things controversial - tended resolutely to avoid speaking of their most troubling thoughts and emotions.
Leaming explains in her thorough research of the platonic connection which Hepburn had with the married, abusive, and alcoholic Spencer Tracy, who was said to have had a penchant for prostitutes and a history of venereal infection. Although Ms. Selden West, who in 1995 was writing “the authorized biography of Spencer Tracy” and who denied ever finding any evidence or medical records to indicate any such infection, Leaming defended her research, writing that “Orson Welles and others told me about Tracy’s obsession that his visits to brothels and the venereal infections he contracted there had caused his son’s deafness. Letters of those who knew Tracy testify to his often-frantic state of mind. Katharine Hepburn, in a Sept. 7, 1944, letter to Philip Barry’s wife, describes him as a wreck who fears he is about to go mad.
Meanwhile, Leaming insists that Hepburn and John Ford “fell in love” and that his grandfather “was obsessed by Kate and found with her a degree of happiness and a peace of mind that he had never known before.” Ford’s grandson, Dan, claims that Leaming “greatly exaggerated the degree and the intensity of the Ford-Hepburn relationship.” In her eighty-eighth year, Hepburn experienced having twenty biographers delve into her life, finding that she had continued to be a presence since her starring role in Morning Glory in 1933.
In 2001 following an operation, she still was hounded by reporters seeking new information about her Hollywood relationships.
At 2:50 p.m. on 29 June 2003 at the age of 96, Hepburn died in her Old Saybrook, Connecticut, home. She had directed that there be no funeral or memorial service, asking that her ashes be interred at a cemetery in her home town of Hartford, Connecticut.
