Katherine Hepburn was born Katharina Houghton Hepburn in Hartford, Connecticut on 12th Might, 1907. Her father was a GP and her mother a civil rights activist. They were both fairly well-off and progressive thinking.

Hepburn’s father promoted the fight against sexually-transmitted illnesses and her mother fought for equal rights for women as a suffragist. They both believed in birth control and women’s education. Katherine was sent to Bryn Mawr College from where she graduated in 1928.

She had five brothers and sisters. She was the second youngest and it left an permanent mark on her life when her elder brother, Tom, was discovered dead, hanging from their aunt’s attic

When at university she met Ludlow Smith and married him the year she graduated. However, the marriage just lasted six years and they were divorced in 1934. However, what was to have more influence on her life than meeting a husband was the passion she acquired for the theatre.

While at college, Hepburn took an active interest in the arts and the theatre and even played roles in two plays after her final exams. This motivated her to become an actress and she moved to New York to study acting. Her first break was in the New York production of “The Big Pond”, although it was not received well. She was fired from the play, but easily found work in other Broadway shows.

Her big break was the 1932 Broadway show called ‘The Warrior’s Husband’. Her performance led to much approbation and many screen checks, one of which resulted in her being offered a role in the 932 film ‘A Bill of Divorcement’. She got rave reviews and never looked back. In 1933, she won her first Academy Award for Best Actress for her part in ‘Morning Glory’.

After this, she returned to New York for a while, but nothing big came her way, so she retried Hollywood, here she got her second Oscar nomination for ‘Stage Door’ in 1937. Her career saw several bad dips in the late Thirties and she was starting to get a reputation of being ‘box office poison’.

She went back to Broadway for the ‘Philadelphia Story’ which was a big success. She bought the film rights and took it to Hollywood, where she earned a further Oscar nomination and she was a big name all over again by 1940. Not long thereafter, Hepburn began in a film with Spencer Tracy called ‘Woman of the Year’ and this was the beginning of a run of eight successful films with Tracy which spanned 25 years

During her hay days of the Forties and Fifties, Hepburn won two Oscars and seven Oscar nominations. In the Seventies she began making TV films and even won an Emmy for ‘Among the Ruins’, which featured Sir Lawrence Olivier.

The only romance that Katherine Hepburn ever admitted to after her husband was with Spencer Tracy, but she never married again. In her last few years, she became a hermit and passed away at home on June, 29th 2003 at the age of 96

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the Home Theater Chair. If you are interested in a Home Movie Theatre, please click through to our site now.