Death of Iconic Actress Hepburn Draws Eulogies
NEW YORK (Reuters) – The death of Katharine Hepburn, the first lady of American cinema who won a record four best actress Oscars, drew eulogies to the auburn-haired beauty known for her fiercely independent spirit.
Hepburn, who starred in classics such as “The African Queen” and who played opposite a galaxy of leading men including Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart, died on Sunday at her home in Connecticut aged 96 “surrounded by loved ones.”
President Bush led tributes to the screen siren. “Katharine Hepburn delighted audiences with her unique talent for more than six decades. She was known for her intelligence and wit and will be remembered as one of the nation’s artistic treasures,” a statement from the president said.
Hepburn, whose health had been in decline for some time and had not spoken for several days, passed away peacefully, said her brother-in-law Ellsworth Grant.
“She’s the greatest actress of her age and with her passing that whole galaxy of great movie stars has ended,” Grant, who saw Hepburn just before she died, told Reuters, adding the cause of her death was “simply complications from old age.”
Hepburn won best actress Oscar four times — in 1933 for “Morning Glory,” 1967 for “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” 1968 for “The Lion in Winter” and in 1981 for “On Golden Pond.”
Irreverent and feisty, Hepburn was voted America’s most admired woman in a 1985 Ladies Home Journal survey. Her trademarks: high cheekbones, her hair and a voice redolent of her upper-class New England origins.
Monday’s Washington Post spoke of her “breathtaking talent and unsurpassed durability.”
PUT WOMEN IN PANTS
“She is the person who put women in pants, literally and figuratively,” her biographer, Christopher Andersen, told Reuters in one interview. “She is the greatest star, the greatest actress, that Hollywood has ever produced.”
The actress did not escape criticism. Her performances were sometimes called cold. Dorothy Parker famously said of Hepburn that she displayed “the gamut of emotions from A to B.”
Other Hepburn classics included “Little Women,” “The Philadelphia Story,” “A Bill of Divorcement,” “Adam’s Rib,” “State of the Union” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”
She acted with James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda. But it is with Tracy that her name will be forever linked.
Hepburn made nine films with Tracy, and for 27 years was the “other woman” in his life. Tracy, a Roman Catholic, would not divorce his wife. Hepburn once said she loved Tracy but did not remember if he had ever told her he loved her.
She had a 1930s affair with billionaire Howard Hughes, but recounted in her 1991 biography “Me” that she never loved him.
Hartford, Connecticut native Hepburn in late 1996 gave up her New York townhouse that she had kept since the 1930s. She retreated to a family mansion in Fenwick, a smart borough in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound.
There she lived a reclusive life and was rarely seen in public. Friends said she suffered from short-term memory loss, but it was not clear if she had Alzheimer’s Disease.
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Despite her carefully guarded privacy, Hepburn surprised the world in March of 2000 — two months before her 93rd birthday — when she told a New York newspaper she was fine.
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