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Katharine Hepburn: Philadelphia Story
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Katharine Houghton Hepburn was born in Hartford, Connecticut on November 12, 1907. Her father, Dr. Thomas Hepburn, was a prominent surgeon. Her mother, Katharine Houghton, was a well-known political activist, prominent in the movement to secure women's rights to vote, and an early proponent of birth control and family planning. Influenced by her mother's outspoken individualism, Katharine Hepburn grew up with her own sense of self, somewhat aloof, but confident and fiercely independent. Katherine attended the Oxford School for Girls in Hartford, Connecticut, and then continued her education at Bryn Mawr in Philadelphia. While at Bryn Mawr, she decided that acting was her calling.
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Hepburn, determined to re-establish herself, returned to the Broadway stage, playing the lead in a successful production of The Philadelphia Story. Having invested in the production, she controlled the screen rights, which she ultimately sold to Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) in return for a tidy profit and the studio's guarantee that she would play the lead in the film version. She did, and the film was a critical and a commercial success. Her Oscar nomination was but one demonstration of the dramatic way she had re-established herself in Hollywood, California.
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In any event, Hepburn resuscitated her career by buying the film rights to Philip Barry’s The Philadelphia Story (borrowing the money from lover Howard Hughes) and starring in the movie version. Critic Andrew Sarris (in “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”) argues compellingly that The Philadelphia Story, in which Hepburn plays a socialite “scolded incessantly for her shortcomings as a daughter and a wife...marks the beginning of Hepburn’s domestication with her own consent and even collaboration.”
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"The Philadelphia Story," though remembered as a celebration of Hepburn's independent spirit, actually plays as a kind of film-length apology by Hepburn for being Hepburn. Though the James Stewart character rhapsodizes about the heroine's incandescent personality, most of the characters treat her as though she were a big, suffocating nuisance, including her father. If the real Hepburn had a father like that, she never would have been Hepburn.
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The keys to Hepburn's longevity were her no-nonsense Yankee sensibility, which won legions of admirers, and her willingness to adapt with the times. After a series of flops in the late 1930s, movie exhibitors put her on a famed "box office poison" list, but she resurrected herself in 1940's The Philadelphia Story.
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George Cukor [who directed Hepburn in Little Women, The Philadelphia Story, and Adam's Rib, among other films] would kid her if she got too la-di-da about a line reading or too precious. "This isn't the theater, you know."
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Philadelphia Story