Katharine Hepburn

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“I’m a personality as well as an actress,” Katharine Hepburn once declared. “Show me an actress who isn’t a personality and you’ll show me a woman who isn’t a star.” Named the top female Greatest American Screen Legend by the American Film Institute in 1999, Hepburn is one of the most prominent actors in Hollywood history. During her long, prosperous career she scraped together twelve Best Actress nominations at the Academy, winning four of them and cementing her status as an idol to many. But how did a woman who in 1933 was branded “Box Office Poison” make such a triumphant comeback? Quotes Kate: “I never realized until lately that women were supposed to be inferior. Only when a woman decides not to have children can she live like a man – That’s what I’ve done.”
Nearly a century ago, Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born to a very eccentric pair of Democrats and grew up in the company of seven brothers and sisters. Her mother, also named Katharine, was one of the earliest advocates of Family Planning and worked alongside husband Thomas to campaign for female suffrage. Kate inherited her parents’ most pronounced traits: an open and ever-expanding mind, a healthy body (maintained by constant exercise), and an inability to tell anything less than the truth. A real tomboy as a child, she wanted to be exactly like older brother Tom and often found herself climbing trees and riding bikes rather than learning to be a “lady” (which was just fine with her

mom). The first tragedy in her life, though, occurred when Tom accidentally hanged himself while practicing a trick their father had taught them, and when her mother died a short time later Kate was forced to “grow up.”
Now the oldest child, Hepburn enrolled at Bryn Mawr College, which was a family tradition on her mother’s side, and found her interests increasingly drawn to the stage. She switched her major before her sophomore year, a...