Obituary

The queen of Hollywood

Katharine Hepburn: 1907-2003. One of acting's greatest legends, who graced the silver screen in more than 40 films and won a record four best actress Oscars, dies at the age of 96.

• The queen of Hollywood • Ms. Hepburn has long been immortal • Special report

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Katharine Hepburn, the actor whose independent life and strong-willed movie characters made her a role model for generations of women and a beloved heroine to filmgoers for more than 60 years, died Sunday (June 29, 2003) at her home in Old Saybrook, Conn. She was 96.

She had been in failing health in recent years, undergoing hip-replacement surgery and treatment for the kind of tremors associated with Parkinson's disease.

Her physical presence was distinctive, her often-imitated voice filled with the vowels of a well-bred New Englander, and her sharp-planed face defined by remarkably high cheekbones. In her youth she did not have classical leading-lady looks, but a handsome beauty.

Ms.Hepburn had what she once described as an "angular face and body, and I suppose an angular personality." She had freckles and copper reddish hair and a voice that Tallulah Bankhead said sounded like "nickels dropping in a slot machine."

In old age, she was a familiar figure with her hair, gradually changing from auburn to gray, always in a topknot, and her boyish figure always in the trousers that she helped to make fashionable.

She played sharp-witted, sophisticated women with an ease that suggested that there was a thin line between the movie role and the off-screen personality. The romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story and the screwball classic Bringing Up Baby were among her best, most typical roles in her more than 40 films and dozens of stage and TV appearances.

Her life and career were dominated by her love affair with Spencer Tracy, which created one of the great romantic legends and brilliant movie pairings of their day. Tracy was unhappily married and the father of two when they met, and he remained married until the end of his life. He and Ms. Hepburn lived together for 27 years, until his death in 1967, and made nine films together.

Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born May 12, 1907, in Hartford, Conn.

In her bestselling 1991 autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life, Ms. Hepburn described herself as a high-spirited child who climbed trees, drove a car around without a license and wanted to be a boy (she called herself "Jimmy").

In 1924 Ms. Hepburn enrolled in Bryn Mawr, her mother's alma mater. She did not excel academically.

After graduating in 1928, she had small parts in stock theater companies. She was dismissed from more than one play when she was starting out, but she retained supreme self-confidence. Late in life, she laughingly said of her younger self, "I am terribly afraid I just assumed I'd be famous."

Ms. Hepburn became a movie star quickly. She won an Academy Award for her role as Eva Lovelace, the naive aspiring actor who learns a tough lesson about survival, in the 1933 film Morning Glory, only her third movie. Over the years she was nominated for a dozen Oscars, which stood as a record for an actor until Meryl Streep surpassed her nomination total in 2003.

She won three more, for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter and On Golden Pond, but never showed up to collect any of them.

She credited her husband with helping her get started in her career. For most of her life, the public thought she had never married. In fact, in 1928 she married Ludlow Ogden Smith, a member of a wealthy Pennsylvania family. They led separate lives long before their divorce in 1934. They had no children.

She played a free-spirited heir in Bringing Up Baby, opposite Cary Grant and a leopard. But the film, now treasured, was a box office flop, and by then her career was in decline.

Rather than appear in a film called Mother Carey's Chickens, she bought out her contract with RKO. She made Holiday, another classic romantic comedy with Grant, in which she was another high-spirited socialite.

Then Ms. Hepburn took charge of her career in a way few women dared in those days of the studio system. Philip Barry wrote the play The Philadelphia Story for her, modeling the female lead, Tracy Lord, on Ms. Hepburn.

The play was a hit, and Ms. Hepburn owned the rights to it because Howard Hughes, a sometime beau, had bought them for her. She went to Louis B. Mayer, the head of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, and sold him the property on the condition that she play the lead. She chose her friend George Cukor to direct. And she asked for Spencer Tracy and Clark Gable as her co-stars. She got Cary Grant as her former husband, James Stewart as the reporter, and a hit movie. She never lost control of her career again.

Soon she went back to Mayer with another script, Woman of the Year, the story of the unlikely romance between a hotshot political columnist and a sportswriter. She asked for Tracy, whom she had never met, to play the sportswriter. This time she got him.

At 5 feet 7, with high heels and a hairstyle that made her look even taller, Ms. Hepburn appeared at their first meeting to tower over the 5-foot-9 Tracy. "I'm afraid I am a little tall for you, Mr. Tracy," she is said to have observed at their first meeting on the set.

"Don't worry, Miss Ms. Hepburn," Tracy is reported to have answered. "I'll cut you down to my size."

The success of Woman of the Year and the stars' off-screen relationship led to other films that followed a similar pattern. In Adam's Rib (1949), they are married, opposing lawyers, both nicknamed Pinky. In Pat and Mike, she is a champion athlete, and he is her rough-hewn manager, with whom she falls in love.

One of her most enduring films without Tracy was The African Queen, in which she played the straitlaced Rosie opposite Humphrey Bogart for the director John Huston. She wrote about it in her first book, published in 1987, whose title captures the direct, colloquial style of her writing: The Making of the African Queen: Or, How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind.

Later she achieved one of her great artistic triumphs in an unlikely role, as the 12th century Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter.

Ms. Hepburn is survived by a brother, Dr. Robert H. Hepburn, and a sister, Margaret H. Perry, both of Canton, Conn.; four nieces; and nine nephews.

- Information from the New York Times, Hartford Courant, Associated Press and Washington Post was used in this report.

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