Word: hepburn
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...afternoon in the early '70s, Katharine Hepburn and two friends entered a loge box in the London theater where Harold Pinter's Old Times was playing. Hepburn soon went prone on the floor of the box to get a closer view of the play--her chin in her cupped hands, her eyes rapt as a schoolgirl's on Christmas morning. That day the laser beam of Hepburn's gaze outshone the spotlights and, nearly, the actors onstage. Did people notice her? Oh, yes: Hepburn was the show, and she knew it. Not for nothing was her autobiography titled...
...Broadway youth; and later, forever, in movies. Hollywood handed her four Oscars for Best Actress (the most any star has won) and eight additional nominations but was confounded by her steely hauteur. Film stars typically possess a glamorous version of the common touch; they are of the earth. Hepburn was apart and above, an aristocrat from some loftier time and code. But she was no standard Great Lady; her emotional intelligence was too prickly. She blew hot and cold in the same breath--her fire had Freon...
...years, moviegoers couldn't keep their eyes off her. She was often parodied but never duplicated. A new actress might be called a Marilyn Monroe type or a Drew Barrymore type, but there was no Kate Hepburn type. There was only Kate Hepburn. With her death last week, at 96, the cinema lost its most domineering goddess...
That flinty spirit was born and bred in Hepburn. Her father, a surgeon, campaigned against venereal diseases. Her mother, who earned graduate degrees from Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe, fought for legalized birth control and women's suffrage. "I was taught to speak out. My parents welcomed debate," Hepburn said in 1981. "My smell for reality comes from them." Kate, who made her public debut at 8 in a Votes for Women Crusade and later spent afternoons handing out leaflets to factory workers, followed her mother's path to Bryn Mawr--and was suspended for smoking. By rebelling, throughout her life...
...stormed Hollywood at 25 in the soaper A Bill of Divorcement. All elbows, and eyes that raked the screen, Hepburn managed to upstage John Barrymore and was immediately a star. Her studio, RKO, put her straight to work: 14 films in the next six years. A year after Divorcement, she played the headstrong, stagestruck ingenue in Morning Glory and won her first Oscar...