This Month

Thursdays in June | 12 Movies

In one of her few television interviews, Katharine Hepburn told host Dick Cavett “I was just lucky! How the hell can you call it anything else?”

This was an unusually timid and modest moment for one of classic Hollywood’s most notoriously bold and certain personalities. Both on screen and in life, Hepburn conveyed an independence and bravery often not found in other actresses of classic Hollywood (or even modern Hollywood). Over her six-decade career, Hepburn starred in over 50 feature films and won a record setting four Best Actress Academy Awards out of 12 nominations, a record she holds to this day.

Her place in Hollywood history is unsurpassed and with each Thursday in June TCM will be honoring her as their Star of the Month.

This five-night tribute will feature 27 Hepburn films, including several of the legend’s less frequently shown and discussed films.

Hepburn won the first of her four Oscars for only her third movie, the backstage romance Morning Glory (1933). This film about a young New England girl who comes to New York certain she can become the world’s greatest actress at any cost and who serendipitously succeeds is a true case of art imitating life. Hepburn first caught the acting bug in college, where she quickly abandoned her original plans of becoming a doctor (her father’s profession) and instead pursued a career on the stage. After a few years of understudy jobs and playing modest character parts, Hepburn achieved Broadway success in “The Warrior’s Husband” in 1932. This stage success brought Hepburn to Hollywood where she found immediate film success playing the daughter of John Barrymore in A Bill of Divorcement (1932). Never one for timidity, Hepburn negotiated her own salary of $1500 a week, a huge sum for an unknown and aggressively pursued the role of Eva Lovelace in Morning Glory. She won the role over several more experienced film actresses, including Constance Bennett.

Despite this immediate stardom she achieved in the early 1930s, Hepburn spent the middle and later part of that decade making many notorious flops. Her home studio of RKO consistently cast the actress in heavy costume dramas and unconventional roles, such as a girl who disguises herself as a boy to protect her fugitive father in Sylvia Scarlett (1935) or a young woman of Victorian England who is more interested in a career than marriage in A Woman Rebels (1936). In 1938, the failure of these films earned Hepburn the label of “Box Office Poison” by American theatre owners. Though not successful at the time of their release, several of Hepburn’s films from this period, such as Stage Door (1937) and Bringing Up Baby (1938), are now regarded as classics. 

Forever a resilient personality and astute businesswoman, Hepburn started off the 1940s by making one of Hollywood’s great comebacks.

Playwright Philip Barry wrote his play “The Philadelphia Story” specifically for Katharine Hepburn and based the role of Tracy Lord, the spoiled daughter of wealthy New Englanders who finds herself with three different potential suitors, on Hepburn herself. When the play became a hit on the Broadway stage in 1939, Hepburn convinced her friend Howard Hughes to lend her the money to buy the film rights herself. When it came time to turn the hit play into a movie, Hepburn was able to ensure that only she would be cast in the same role for the film. She was also able to secure her friend George Cukor as her director. Hepburn’s original choices for leading men in the film were Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, but both were unavailable. Her substitutes of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart couldn’t have been much of a hardship. Hepburn strategically chose to wave her salary and instead opt for a share of the film’s profits. It was the right move. The film became one of the biggest money makers of 1940 and won two Academy Awards, for Donald Ogden Stewart’s screenplay and for Jimmy Stewart as Best Actor of the year (an honor the humble actor never felt comfortable with). The Philadelphia Story (1940) not only put Hepburn back on Hollywood’s A-list but is now regarded as one of the best films of her career and of the Golden Age Hollywood.

Now under contract to MGM, Hepburn followed up her success in The Philadelphia Story with the first of nine films she would make with the man she soon considered the love of her life, Spencer Tracy. Woman of the Year (1942) tells the story of two rival reporters at the same newspaper whose initial hostility turns into love. Hepburn’s character of Tess begins the movie as a nationally known feminist career woman but finds herself unexpectedly wanting to be more domestic for the sake of her new husband Sam (Tracy). Adam’s Rib (1949) saw the pair as a married pair of lawyers who find themselves on opposite sides of a case involving a woman (Judy Holliday in her first significant film role) who has shot her husband. These comic battle-of-the-sexes stories were the most successful of the duos films and remain the best remembered of their pairings. However, the team made a wide variety of films of several genres. In the crime mystery Keeper of the Flame (1942), Tracy is a journalist out to solve the death of national hero in a mysterious auto accident. The Sea of Grass (1947) took the team out to the New Mexico frontier of the late 1800s, with Hepburn as a St. Louis woman who falls for her cattle rancher (Tracy).

While Hepburn was and is regarded as a hero of feminism and female independence, she openly expressed in her later years the deep devotion she had to Spencer Tracy and how she often prioritized his happiness over her own. She could never bring herself to watch their final film together, 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). This groundbreaking (for its time) film about an aging San Francisco couple whose daughter (played by Hepburn’s real life niece Katharine Houghton) is engaged to an African American man (Sidney Poitier) was one of the first to portray an interracial couple. Spencer Tracy died of a heart attack only 17 days after shooting on the film had wrapped. Though devastated by the death of her partner of 27 years, Hepburn’s career reached a new height at the end of the 1960s. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, more than 30 years after her first. She won again the following year (in an unprecedented tie with Barbra Streisand for her sensational debut in Funny Girl,1968), for playing Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter (1968). The only American in the cast and 25 years older than her leading man Peter O’Toole, Hepburn found the location shoot a challenging experience, but later looked back on the film as one of her favorites and best performances.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about Hepburn’s career was its longevity. In 1969 she earned a Tony nomination for her performance as the title character in the musical “Coco”, about the life of fashion designer Coco Chanel. She made her television debut and received an Emmy nomination for playing Amanda Wingfield in the 1973 TV-movie version of Tennessee Williams’ classic “The Glass Menagerie.” She would win the Emmy two years later for her performance in Love Among the Ruins (1975), her only film with fellow legend Sir Laurence Olivier.

Hepburn’s last great leading film role was in 1981’s On Golden Pond (1981). In their only film together, Hepburn and fellow legend Henry Fonda (in his final performance) play Ethel and Norman Thayer, an elderly couple spending the summer at their New England lake house who confront the complicated relationship they have with their estranged daughter Chelsea (played by Henry Fonda’s real-life daughter, Jane Fonda). Hepburn had seen the original play on Broadway and when she got word that Jane Fonda had purchased the film rights and was planning to make the film as a vehicle for her father, she reached out directly to her in pursuit of the role. 73 years old at the time of filming, Hepburn showed that her famous athleticism was as strong as ever by performing several of her own stunts, including a dive into the freezing Lake Winnipesaukee and hauling a bundle of lumber for an entire scene. Both Hepburn and Fonda won Academy Awards for their performances. Amazingly, the two legends had not only never worked together, but had never even met before making this classic film together.

Katharine Hepburn’s unsurpassed film career remains one of the most impressive in all of movies and is a testament to not only her talent, but her determination.