A Tribute to Katharine Hepburn

Perhaps the greatest actress of all times, this article is dedicated to the great Katharine Houghton Hepburn, a.k.a. The First Lady of Cinema or The Great Kate. She was born May 12, in 1907 in Hartford Connecticut.She was the daughter of a doctor and a suffragette, both of whom almost always encouraged her to speak her mind, develop it fully, and exercise her body to its full potential.as a child she seemed to be very close to her brother Tom,who accidentally hung himself while practicing a trick that his father had taught him. It became apparent right away that Tom's death had a profound effect on her. She used his birthday as her own for many years to come. Since she was some what of a tomboy in her early years, she tended to shy away from other girls and ended up being schooled athome. But her athletic abilities would shine in her early years when she won the bronze medal for figure skating from the Madison Square Garden skating club and reached the semi-finals at the Connecticut Young Women's Gold Championship.

Eventually she would attend Bryn Mawr College where she would get interested in acting. She was expelled for smoking and breaking curfew, but ended up receiving a degree inhistory and philosophy.That same year [1928] she debuted on Broadway after landing a part in Night Hostess. And she also became engagedto a socialite businessman Ludow Ogden Smith. That marriage would last until1934, but they would remain friends for a lifetime.

Hepburn's first leading role was in a production of The Big Pond, which opened in Great Neck, New York but had such a bad time that she was eventually fired but later rehired when the producer could not find a replacement. I think it was her 1932 role of Antiopethe Amazon princess in "The Warrior's Husband" that actually started her career moving. She was noticed by Hollywood and received a part in A Bill of Divorcement in which she demanded $1,500 a week. That was an unheard of sum in those days.

She 1935 she had earned her second Oscar nomination but by 1938 her career had began to decline.But in 1940 when she appeared in The Philadelphia Story and her careerrevived almost overnight. It was in her 1942 appearance with Spencer Tracy in Womanof the year that marked the beginning of her long term affiliation with Tracy. They appeared in nine movies in which Hepburn won her second Academy Award for bestactress. It was their long term affair with each other that would spark the tonguesof everyone that was fascinated with the lives of Hollywood actors and actresses.

When most people talk of Hepburn today the one movie that stands out among all of them is The African Queen in which she received her fifth Best Actress nomination.It was a 1951 movie that pared her with another great Hollywood icon, Humphrey Bogart. It was filmed mostly on location in Africa where she drank gallons of waterand ended up so sick with dysentery that she still felt the effects months afterreturning home. Throughout the rest of her life she would play mostly spinsters.She would continue working until 1994 and died on June 29, 2003.

She holds the record for the most "Best Actress Oscar" wins with four.Hepburn won an Emmy Award in 1975 for her lead role in Love Among the Ruins opposite her friend Laurence Olivier, and was nominated for four other Emmy's and two Tony Awards during the course of her more than 70-year acting career.