LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Katharine Hepburn: Roles
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Katharine Hepburn provided some new perspectives on her personality and the roles she played on stage and screen in her autobiography, published after she retired from performance. In it she stressed the important influence of her liberal intellectual family, and her continued closeness with her siblings and their offspring. Through this charming, witty and frank summing up of herself may be discerned the natural aristocracy of the person and the solidity and permanence of her character.
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Later, Hepburn was cast in a speaking part in the Broadway play Art and Mrs. Bottle. Hepburn was fired from this role as well, though she was eventually rehired when the director could not find anyone to replace her. After another summer of stock companies, in 1932, Hepburn landed the role of Antiope the Amazon princess in The Warrior's Husband (an update of Lysistrata), which required her to wear a very short costume and debuted to excellent reviews. Hepburn became the talk of New York City, and began getting noticed by Hollywood.
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Hepburn understudied Broadway star Hope Williams, who had “a slim figure, a boy’s haircut, and an arm-swinging stride. The half-boy, half-woman had been born,” Hepburn noted. Hope was to star in The WARRIOR’S HUSBAND in 1932, but ended up doing another play, so Kate got her role.
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Hepburn has represented, on a number of levels, a problem that Hollywood never quite managed to solve, although it proposed a number of partial solutions. Aspects of the problem were how to publicize her; how to deal with her intransigent demands for better or different types of roles; which leading man, or type of male lead, to cast with or against her; and what sort of star vehicles to construct around her. Central to the problem is her famous rebelliousness. It is fitting that one of her 1930s films should be titled A Woman Rebels, since this characteristic was consistently expressed both by the characters she played and in her offscreen image. The rebelliousness could be used, up to a point, to construct her as an attractive identification-figure for the female viewer; but it threatened continuously to become too subversive, too radical, too incontainable. The problem Hollywood faced with Hepburn was, precisely, that of containment.
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A screen legend, Hepburn holds the record for the most Best Actress Oscar wins with four, from twelve nominations (Meryl Streep currently holds the record for most overall acting nominations with fourteen). Hepburn won an Emmy Award in 1976 for her lead role in Love Among the Ruins, and was nominated for four other Emmys and two Tony Awards during the course of her more than 70-year acting career. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Hepburn as the top female star of all time.
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Hepburn was already reeling from a devastating series of earlier flops when in 1938 she (along with Fred Astaire, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, and others) was voted "box office poison" in a poll taken by motion picture exhibitors. In 1939, Hepburn wanted the role of Scarlett O'Hara, but David O. Selznick insisted that she did not have the lustful, sexual appeal that the part needed. The night before the deadline, Selznick finally cast Vivien Leigh.
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