Katharine Hepburn Dead

abc news ^ | 06-29-03 | Registered

[Registered]

Yep, she's left us

[Darksheare]

Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in "Bringing Up Baby"

[wimpycat]

I do remember an interview she did with Barbara Walters, I believe, in which she said that women can't have a marriage AND a full-time career, that women can't do it all. But she was raised a typical liberal. Spencer Tracy recalled an episode in which the family were gathered around the dinner table, arguing politics as they usually did, and arguing about taking care of the poor. Then right after dinner, Katharine's father had an encounter with a man (a hobo/homeless or otherwise poor man) who was walking across their part of the beach and Mr. Hepburn threatened to have the man arrested for trespassing. The irony was not lost on Spencer Tracy.

She's the one who was asked, "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" and she said she'd be an oak.

[dighton]

[blackdog]

RIP to a classy woman. My daughter who is 15 and about to graduate from high school next year has adopted Hepburn as her Idol since a few years ago. She watched that Lion movie(Hopkins, Hepburn, Richard Harris about midevil England and it's rule), and that performance made African Queen seem like a Steven Segal flick.

[HairOfTheDog]

Awwww schucks.....

She was such a classy lady... An old fashioned movie star.

[deadhead]

Rest In Peace Kate

[Clara Lou]

What an actress. She was one of a kind. These last few weeks have been rough.

[bvw]

From the linked obit:

Commenting on why she rarely attended the awards ceremonies at which she was to be honored, Hepburn explained in typically frank fashion, "As for me, prizes mean nothing. My prize is my work." The American Film Institute voted her the greatest American female screen legend of all time.

Hepburn once remarked of her celebrated status in show business, "I'm a legend because I've survived over a long period of time and still seem to be master of my fate — I'm still paddling the goddamned boat myself."

Cleary, at heart she was no atheist! That's a wonderful attitude to have about prices and honors.

[Registered]

Brief Bio:

Katherine Hepburn was born on May 12, 1907 in Hartford, Connecticut. She was raised in a very wealthy family, as her father was a medical doctor. Since her mother believed in suffrage, she raised Katherine to be outspoken and to fully develop her mind. She was also taught to stretch her abilities to their limits. She was one of two children and when she was fourteen years of age, her brother died accidentally when he was practicing a hanging trick that their father had taught him. She was devastated by his death and she was the one who found his dead body. Because she withdrew into herself, she was home schooled.


She went to college at Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania. All this young woman wanted was to be famous. She didn’t have a desire to act or to learn the craft. But while at Bryn Mawr, Miss Hepburn changed her mind and went into acting.

In 1928, she made her professional debut on stage in Baltimore, Maryland. This was also the same year she married Ludlow Ogden Smith. Their marriage last until April 30, 1933, the day their divorce became final.


In the 1930’s, Miss Hepburn was not a box office draw so she turned her efforts to the theatre since she was unable to get any acting jobs.


In 1942, she made the movie "Woman of the Year" starring opposite actor Spencer Tracy. This was the first of ten movies they made together and this was also the beginning of their love affair which last twenty-five years. Spencer Tracy never divorced his wife but later on did move in with Miss Hepburn. They were together until Mr. Tracy’s death.


In the 1950’s, she made her Broadway debut in Shakespearean plays. She didn’t let anything stop her from working.


Miss Hepburn has made over fifty films in made for television movies and on the big screen. She also did a two-year stretch from 1976 to 1978 in the play "Matter of Gravity" and has starred in other plays throughout her acting career. She has always been cast in strong female roles. Her presence on the screen has always been an animated personality. She has had many leading men who also play strong leads. She never outshone her co-stars.


She has written two books "The Making of the African Queen" and "Me" both of which were published in 1991. Both books hit the best seller list.

Currently, Miss Hepburn has suffered a complete loss of her short-term memory. She is frail and has withdrawn from the world around her. She sits in front of the window in her home looking out into the world. She resides in Fenwick, Connecticut

[Hillary's Lovely Legs]

[speedy]

Good story. Many times going to meetings I have walked past her townhouse in the Turtle Bay section of NYC. Stephen Sondheim lived right up the street, and across from them was the former home of famed violinist Efrem Zimbalist Sr. Never caught a glimpse of her, though.

[LibWhacker]

She was raised in a very wealthy family, as her father was a medical doctor.

How times have changed. :-(

[ru4liberty]

avowed atheist

A troubling thing to read. I can't bear to think about her fate. I would wish for her to RIP, but....

[MrsEmmaPeel]

Thanks for that. Guess what tune is now running through my head? ...
I can't give you anything but love, Baby ...

[Petronski]

The Hollywood legend died at her home in Connecticut, ABCNEWS has learned. She was surrounded by family and friends.

One of the last stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, Hepburn's roles ranged from ingenue in A Bill of Divorcement to indomitable queen in The Lion in Winter. Some of her better-known films include Bringing Up Baby, The Philadelphia Story, The African Queen, Pat and Mike, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? and On Golden Pond.

Hepburn's life and career were marked by fierce independence, unending vitality and remarkable dedication to friends, family and work. She was the only actor or actress in history to have been nominated for 12 Academy Awards, and the only woman to win four as best actress — three of them after the age of 60.

Master of Her Fate

Commenting on why she rarely attended the awards ceremonies at which she was to be honored, Hepburn explained in typically frank fashion, "As for me, prizes mean nothing. My prize is my work." The American Film Institute voted her the greatest American female screen legend of all time.

Hepburn once remarked of her celebrated status in show business, "I'm a legend because I've survived over a long period of time and still seem to be master of my fate — I'm still paddling the goddamned boat myself."

Her uniquely East Coast establishment personality made her one of the most outspoken and vital figures in Hollywood history and earned her the unabashed admiration of colleagues and audiences alike.

She always credited her distinctive character to her parents: "The single most important thing anyone needs to know about me," she said, "is that I am totally, completely the product of two damn fascinating individuals who happened to be my parents."

The daughter of a wealthy and unconventional family — her father, Thomas Hepburn, was a prominent surgeon and urologist, and her mother, Katharine Hepburn (née Houghton) was a famous suffragette and birth control activist — Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born May 12, 1907, in Hartford, Conn.

She would also be deeply affected by the death of her beloved brother, Tom, who hanged himself (it's unclear whether it was a suicide or an accident). It was 14-year-old Kate who found him. For many years after, she would use his birthday, Nov. 8, as her own.

After Tom's death, Hepburn was largely schooled at home, but then went on to Bryn Mawr College. After graduating in 1928, she commenced a career as a theatrical actress, earning a string of increasingly conspicuous parts in summer stock and Broadway productions.

That same year, she married businessman Ludlow Ogden Smith, whom she convinced to change his name to S. Ogden Ludlow so that she would not be known by the plain-Jane name "Kate Smith." The couple soon separated.

A Style All of Her Own

Hepburn's big break came in the form of a starring role as Antiope the Amazon queen in the 1932 Broadway comedy The Warrior's Husband. After summarily rejecting some unacceptable clauses in a film contract offered by RKO, Hepburn joined the studio, debuting in the role of John Barrymore's daughter in George Cukor's A Bill of Divorcement (1932).

She won her first best actress Oscar for her performance in her third feature film outing, the 1933 movie Morning Glory, as an actress trying to make it on Broadway. Her early films positioned her to play physically and verbally strong, rebellious female characters, a forceful persona developed to best advantage in Little Women (1933), Alice Adams (1935, an Oscar-nominated performance) and Sylvia Scarlett (1936).

Katharine Hepburn Katharine Hepburn receives an award from Planned Parenthood in 1988. (Ed Bailey/AP Photo)
From her earliest days in Hollywood, Hepburn exhibited an arrogant disdain for star etiquette. The angular redhead dressed mannishly and unbecomingly by movie idol standards (she wore slacks and refused to wear makeup); her crisp New England diction and uniquely emancipated mindset were off-putting to many; she refused to submit to requests for studio publicity shots, autographs or interviews; and she didn't fraternize with her co-workers.

Qualities the movie-going public and critics deemed signs of self-absorbed haughtiness were actually hallmarks of Hepburn's dedicated professionalism. But in an era when star patina was prized over talent, she suffered at the box office for her unyielding personality and refusal to be shoehorned into roles she found unsuitable.

Finding Philadelphia

Not even her lead assignment in the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby could resuscitate Hepburn's flagging popularity, and after a disappointing string of misfires, a leading exhibitor conferred upon her the career-killing label of "box-office poison."

But she still had supporters. For his part, Cary Grant concluded of his frequent co-star, "There's no pretense about her. She's the most completely honest woman I've ever met."

Hepburn had no intention of giving up, and in 1939, she returned to Broadway in a role written expressly with her in mind in Phillip Barry's The Philadelphia Story. She was so certain of the play's potential that she even acquired the film rights. (Billionaire Howard Hughes, who romanced Hepburn, reportedly purchased them for her.)

A feted success in the stage production, Hepburn returned to Hollywood on her own terms, negotiating her choice of co-stars (Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant) and director (George Cukor, with whom she would go on to collaborate on some of the best films of her career) for MGM's 1940 film version of the play.

The movie was a smash, and so was she as the elegantly frosty socialite Tracy Lord; The Philadelphia Story broke box-office records and earned Hepburn her third Oscar nomination.

The Tracy Years

MGM next paired Hepburn with Spencer Tracy in the 1942 film Woman of the Year. The film got her another Academy Award nomination, but more importantly, it launched the legendary team of Tracy and Hepburn, both professionally and personally.

Though the couple never married — Tracy, a staunch Catholic, felt that he couldn't divorce his wife, though he lived apart from her for decades — their legendary love affair lasted 25 years, ending only with Tracy's death in 1967. Professionally, the duo excelled at the battle of the sexes, and their inspired duels in State of the Union (1948), Adam's Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952) made the films classics.

Outside of her successful string of romantic comedies and dramas with Tracy, Hepburn gave equally delightful performances on her own. She moved smoothly into playing older character leads in films such as The African Queen (1951), with Humphrey Bogart, and Suddenly Last Summer (1959). Both performances drew Oscar nominations. Bogart said of his reputedly fractious leading lady, "I don't think she tries to be a character. I think she is one."

In 1962, Hepburn delivered an unforgettable, Oscar-nominated turn as the morphine-addled matriarch of the hopelessly dysfunctional Tyrone family in the film version of Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey Into Night. She received top honors at the Cannes Film Festival for her stunning performance.

Following work on that film, Hepburn withdrew from the public eye for five years to tend to Tracy as his health progressively deteriorated. For the last of her nine collaborations with Tracy (and, as it turned out, his last film before a heart attack took his life), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (1967), Hepburn took home her second best actress Oscar statuette.

Soon after Tracy's death, Hepburn took home a third Oscar for the 1968 film The Lion in Winter, in which she co-starred with Peter O'Toole.

Throughout the 1970s and '80s, the actress continued to star on TV, in films and on the stage. Both she and Laurence Olivier earned Emmy awards for the 1975 George Cukor-directed TV movie Love Among the Ruins. On Broadway, she portrayed Coco Chanel in the 1969 musical Coco.

Aging Gracefully

Hepburn continued to evince a regal pride despite a progressive neurological disease, said to be Parkinson's, that made her head shake uncontrollably. She continued to throw herself into her work notwithstanding her deteriorating health, scoring a fourth Oscar for her performance in the 1981 movie On Golden Pond, in which she enjoyed her one on-screen collaboration with the legendary actor Henry Fonda.

She survived a near-fatal car crash in 1984, and gamely carried on with her regimen of icy showers, chocolate candies and intermittent roles in TV movies like Mrs. Delafield Wants to Marry, The Man Upstairs and This Can't Be Love.

In 1987, Hepburn wrote a popular memoir titled The Making of 'The African Queen,' or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind; she followed up with a best-selling autobiography, Me, in 1992.

In 1994, Warren Beatty convinced the 87-year-old actress to come out of retirement to essay the role of his great-aunt in Love Affair, the last feature-film appearance of Hepburn's lengthy career. It was apparent from the ease with which she upstaged her co-stars — Beatty and Annette Benning — that Katharine Hepburn had lost none of her touch.

Role Model for Women

The occasion of Hepburn's 90th birthday, on May 12, 1997, was marked by the dedication of the Katharine Hepburn Garden in Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at the United Nations. The garden is in the New York City neighborhood of Turtle Bay, of where the actress lived for six decades. Extremely frail at the time, Hepburn did not attend the event. She opted instead to celebrate with little fanfare at the Hepburn family residence in Fenwick, Conn., where she had lived since leaving Manhattan in 1996.

Though she hadn't performed in recent years, Hepburn maintained her relentlessly positive and engaged outlook on life. To filmgoers, she will always epitomize the noble independence, sophistication and emancipation that were her hallmarks throughout her life and inspired generations of young women.

"I've had a fascinating life," Hepburn once commented. "I don't think I'm the least bit peculiar, but people tell me I am."

[visualops]

"The calla lilies are in bloom again. Such a strange flower-- suitable to any occasion. I carried them on my wedding day, and now I place them here in memory of something that has died."

[TomGuy]

FoxNews had a nice tribute to KH...but their dang FoxNewsAlert red and blue banner covered the bottom 1/3.

Why can't FoxNews get a clue about than [expletive deleted] FoxNewsAlert banner when they are showing video?

[exnavy]

She is a Grand Lady, who will be missed, go in peace with God, Kate.

[L.N. Smithee]

Although I howled with laughter at her in Bringing Up Baby, I wasn't exactly a fan of hers, and when she brazenly and proudly talked about her clandestine adulterous relationship with the married Spencer Tracy, I couldn't stand to look at her.

[BossLady]

Lion In Winter Bump!!!! RIP Kate!