Katharine Hepburn, the quintessence of the stage and screen star and a brilliant, legendary, indefatigable American icon who defied superlatives while personifying grace, wit, craft, and class during a six-decade career, died Sun., June 29, at her home in Old Saybrook, Conn. She was 96. According to press reports, the cause of death was old age.
Born Katharine Houghton Hepburn on May 12, 1907 to a prominent doctor and a mother who was an outspoken suffragette and women's rights advocate, she was arguably the last living luminary of Hollywood's golden era. Certainly she was one of the most storied, revered, esteemed, and honored actresses of the 20th century, winning an unprecedented four Academy Awards for Best Actress—for "Morning Glory" (1933), "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967), "The Lion in Winter" (1968), and "On Golden Pond" (1981)—and receiving 12 nominations overall, a record that held until Meryl Streep added a 13th nod to her resume this year.
Hepburn's private life, which she fiercely guarded, added to her forthright, headstrong, independent, and iconoclastic aura, the most obvious example of which was her long romantic linkage to Spencer Tracy. Yet it shouldn't be forgotten that Hepburn wore slacks in an era when dresses and gowns were the rule—just one illustration of how Hepburn refused to engage, as most Hollywood stars of the era did, in the studio-dictated mix of conformity and cooperation deemed necessary to maintain their public image and their box-office appeal.
Which is not to say that Hepburn did not use her public image when it suited her. She long allowed the public to believe she had never married when, in fact, she wed Ludlow Ogden Smith, scion of a wealthy Pennsylvania family, in 1928, purchasing the Turtle Bay townhouse with him that she owned until her death. (They divorced in 1934.) In her later years, Hepburn penned several books; "Me: Stories of My Life," published in 1991, became a best seller.
Back on screen, Hepburn's career could easily double as an overview of a great swath of 20th-century film. Early on, she was known as a gifted, top-drawer star of such '30s and '40s films as "Little Women" (1933), "Alice Adams" (1935), "Stage Door" (1937), "Bringing Up Baby" (1938), "Holiday" (1938), "The Philadelphia Story" (1940), "Woman of the Year" (1942), "State of the Union" (1948), and "Adam's Rib" (1949). But Hepburn, one could argue, truly came into her own as she aged. Her performances in "The African Queen" (1951), "Summertime" (1955), "The Rainmaker" (1956), and "Desk Set" (1957)—and later, "Long Day's Journey Into Night" (1962), "The Madwoman of Chaillot" (1969), "The Trojan Women" (1971), "The Glass Menagerie" (1973), "A Delicate Balance" (1973), and her last film, "Love Affair" (1994)—were as instantly memorable as her work in all the films for which she captured Oscars. Rare was the Hepburn film that left no mark, for no figure was as distinctive, no voice more recognized, no presence more electric, no personality more model, more celebrated, more analyzed. And while she may not have been an actress who disappeared inside a role, she successfully played a huge range of work, from Euripides, Shakespeare, and Shaw to Barry, Laurents, Giraudoux, Gordon and Kanin, and O'Neill.
The stage, however, was actually Hepburn's first love; her acting career began at a summer-stock house in Ivoryton, Conn. after graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1928, and throughout the rest of her career, her theatrical forays were always of note. Her Broadway debut came the year she graduated—an eight-performance flop called "These Days"—and her Main Stem showings during the decade following fared little better. The biggest flop of them all—"The Lake" in 1933—acquired titanic status when Dorothy Parker penned her famous aphorism that Hepburn "runs the gamut of emotions from A to B."
By the late '30s, Hepburn's cinematic star had fallen almost as fast as it had risen, and after suffering a string of flops—and maybe in response to her tempestuous, authority-defying personality—she was dubbed box-office "poison." Decamping for New York, she finally triumphed on Broadway in Philip Barry's "The Philadelphia Story," repeating her success in the subsequent film. Hepburn's other Broadway turns included Shakespeare's "As You Like It" (1950), Shaw's "The Millionairess" (1953), the Alan Jay Lerner-André Previn tuner "Coco" (1969), Enid Bagnold's "A Matter of Gravity" (1976), and Ernest Thompson's "The West Side Waltz." (Thompson also wrote the stage and screen versions of "On Golden Pond.") Hepburn was twice nominated for Tonys—for "Coco" and for "The West Side Waltz."
Hepburn's funeral will be private. She is survived by a brother, a sister, and numerous nieces and nephews.
—Leonard Jacobs