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Katharine Hepburn: African Queen
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Educated by private tutors and at exclusive schools, Hepburn entered Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1924. Upon graduating four years later, she immediately embarked on a successful career in the theater. Her critical success as an Amazon queen in the satire The Warrior's Husband led to a contract with the film studio RKO. In 1932 she made her film debut in that company's A Bill of Divorcement, playing opposite John Barrymore (1882–1942). She received rave reviews for her performance and achieved stardom overnight.
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Bacall met Hepburn during the filming of The African Queen, in which Hepburn co-starred with Bogart, who was Bacall's husband. The encounter, detailed by Hepburn in her 1987 book The Making of The African Queen, or, How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and Almost Lost my Mind, led to a lifelong friendship between the two actresses, despite the difference in their ages. After Hepburn's death in 2003, Bacall wrote of her, "She unknowingly made me aware of ways to live and to behave that were new to me. So although there is a large, empty space in my life without her, there is all that past to remember."
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Hepburn is perhaps best remembered for her role in The African Queen (1951), for which she received her fifth Best Actress nomination, losing to Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire. She played a prim spinster missionary in Africa who convinces Humphrey Bogart's character, a hard-drinking riverboat captain, to use his boat to attack a German ship.
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[I]f one film was the pivot of Hepburn's popularity, it was The African Queen (1951), where she and Humphrey Bogart made a salty, romantic coupling, like kids let out to play. On that dangerous African location, she won the love and admiration of director John Huston, by hunting with him and generally roughing it. In return, years later, in her book about the film, she described him as a pagan god.
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After leaving MGM in 1951, Hepburn divided her time between the stage - she appeared in Shaw's ''The Millionairess'' and Shakespeare's ''As You Like It'' - and film. She coolly braved a jungle for ''The African Queen'' and did her own balloon flying in the low-budget ''Olly Olly Oxen Free.''
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These two films, together with The African Queen (1951) in which Hepburn starred with Humphrey Bogart, are her most interesting explorations of women's place in society. Not only do they directly confront the issue of the potentialities and role of women as the equals of men and the possibilities for heterosexual relationships under those circumstances, but they do so without unduly compromising their heroines' struggles for self-fulfilment with lame 'male-chauvinist' endings.
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