Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 June 29, 2003) was an American actress of film, stage, and television. Hepburn’s career as a Hollywood leading woman spanned on summit of 60 years. Known for her headstrong independence and full of activity personality, she cultivated a screen persona that matched this public image, and regularly played strong-willed, far-off and wide along women.
Her acquit yourself came in a range of genres, from screwball comedy to educational performing arts, and she usual four Academy Awards for Best Actressa baby book for any artiste. In 1999, Hepburn was named by the American Film Institute the greatest female star of timeless Hollywood cinema.
Raised in Connecticut by affluent, in the estrange away ahead parents, Hepburn began to court accomplishment though studying at Bryn Mawr College. Favorable reviews of her outfit re the subject of Broadway brought her to the attention of Hollywood.
She found a recess playing center-aged spinsters, such as in The African Queen (1951), a persona the public embraced.
In the 1970s, she began appearing in television films, which superior became the focus of her career. She made her gigantic screen look at the age of 87. After a era of inactivity and in poor health health, Hepburn died in 2003 at the age of 96.
Hepburn famously shunned the Hollywood backing machine and she refused to conform to organization’s expectations of women.
Early life and education
Hepburn was born on May 12, 1907, in Hartford, Connecticut, the second of six children. Her parents were Thomas Norval Hepburn (18791962), a urologist at Hartford Hospital, and Katharine Martha Houghton (18781951), a feminist futuristic. Both parents fought for social fiddle subsequently in the US: Thomas Hepburn helped broadcast the New England Social Hygiene Association, which educated the public approximately venereal illness, though the elder Katharine headed the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association and well along campaigned for birth rule behind Margaret Sanger.
As a child, Hepburn connected her mother harshly speaking several “Votes For Women” demonstrations. She remained near to her family throughout her cartoon.
Golf became a passion of Hepburn’s; she took daily lessons and became highly skillful, reaching the semi-realize of the Connecticut Young Women’s Golf Championship. Hepburn was a lover of movies from a teenage age and went to see one all Saturday night.
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In March 1921, Hepburn, 13, and her 15-year-antiquated brother Tom were visiting New York, staying considering a friend of their mother’s in Greenwich Village on extremity of the Easter crack. On March 30, Hepburn discovered the body of her adored older brother dead from an apparent suicide.
He had tied a curtain tie roughly a beam and hanged himself. The incident made the young people Hepburn aquiver, temperamental, and suspicious of people.
For many years she used Tom’s birthday (November 8) as her own. It was not until her 1991 autobiography, Me: Stories of My Life, that Hepburn revealed her genuine birth date.
Once her marks had greater than before, she began drama regularly. She performed the benefit role in a production of The Woman in the Moon in her senior year, and the certain response it highly thought of cemented Hepburn’s plans to pursue a theatrical career. She graduated back a degree in archives and philosophy in June 1928.
Career
Hepburn left academe circles assenting to become an actress. The daylight after graduating, she traveled to Baltimore to meet Edwin H. Knopf, who ran a copious stockpile theatre company. Impressed by her energy, Knopf cast Hepburn in his current production, The Czarina.
Hopkins promptly hired Hepburn as the lead understudy in Philip Barry’s organization Holiday. In in front December, after lonely two weeks, she quit to marry Ludlow Ogden Smith, a educational acquaintance.
Personal life
She distanced herself from the celebrity lifestyle, uninterested in a social scene she proverb as tedious and superficial, and she wore casual clothes that went strongly neighboring to convention in an time of glamour. She rarely appeared in public, even avoiding restaurants, and once than wrestled a camera out of a photographer’s hand behind he took a portray without asking.
Despite her swiftness for privacy, she enjoyed her fame, and progressive confessed that she would not have liked the press to ignore her certainly. The protective attitude toward her private simulation thawed as she aged; beginning as soon as a two-hour-long interview upon The Dick Cavett Show in 1973, Hepburn became more appreciation behind the public.
This self-assuredness expected she could be controlling and complex; Hepburn confessed to swine, especially yet to be in liveliness, “a me me me person”.
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The actress led an nimble life, reportedly swimming and playing tennis all daylight. In her eighties she was yet playing tennis regularly, as indicated in her 1993 documentary All About Me. She with enjoyed painting, which became a passion higher in energy.
When questioned about politics, Hepburn told an interviewer, “I always just statement be around the affirmative and understanding in the spread of looking side. Don’t be a “no” person.” The amalgamated in the middle of-Communist attitude in 1940s Hollywood prompted her to political argument, as she related the Committee for the First Amendment.
Later in computer graphics, she openly promoted birth run and supported the concrete right to abortion. She described herself as a “dedicated Democrat”. She adept Albert Schweitzer’s theory of “Reverence for Life”, but did not endure in religion or the afterlife.
In 1991, Katharine Hepburn told a journalist, “I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I admit there’s nothing we can know, except that we should be come taking place gone the part for a ruling not guilty to each shape ahead and realize what we can for accumulation people.” Her public declarations of these beliefs led the American Humanist Association to reply her the Humanist Arts Award in 1985.
Relationships
The couple wed upon December 12, 1928, to the front she was 21 and he was 29. Smith misrepresented his pronounce to S. Ogden Ludlow at her behest so that she would not be “Kate Smith”, which she considered too plain.
She never sufficiently functional to the marriage and prioritized her career. The involve to Hollywood in 1932 cemented the couple’s superiority, and in 1934, she traveled to Mexico to obtain a rude divorce. The pair remained links until his death in 1979.
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The affair lasted four years. In 1936, though she was touring Jane Eyre, Hepburn began a relationship later than swashbuckler Howard Hughes. They estranged in 1938, subsequent to Hepburn left Hollywood after swine labeled “crate office poison”.
Rumors have existed back the 1930s that Hepburn was a lesbian or bisexual, which she often joked roughly. In 2007, William J. Mann released a biography of the actress in which he argued this was the feat.
Final years and death
Katharine Hepburn stated in her eighties, “I have no scare of death. Must be fabulous, also than a long sleep.” Her health began to deteriorate not long after her unlimited screen appearance, and she was hospitalized in March 1993 for exhaustion. In the winter of 1996, she was hospitalized taking into account pneumonia. She showed signs of dementia in her obstinate years.
Hepburn’s death conventional considerable public attention. Many tributes were held concerning television, and newspapers and magazines dedicated issues to the actress. American president George W. Bush said Hepburn “will be remembered as one of the nation’s artistic treasures”.