Katharine Hepburn

It is certainly possible to imagine as strong a person as Katharine Hepburn (b. 1907–d. 2003) existing without the classical Hollywood studio system. It is rather difficult to imagine a Hollywood without Hepburn, however, given her omnipresence on American screens for the better part of a century. Emblematic of the independence sought by many women across varying professions in the United States in the years after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution in 1920, Hepburn’s iconic presence onscreen across seven decades of film and television effectively demarcated—and frequently transcended—culturally prevalent ideas regarding what a female performer might achieve in film in the United States. Born in 1907, Hepburn—the daughter of a suffragist mother and a doctor father—eventually chose a career in performance. Her journey began with an uneven career on the stage in the 1920s. Hepburn’s breakthrough in the theater arrived via an appearance in The Warrior’s Husband (1932) and this success led to her screen debut in George Cukor’s adaptation of the Clemence Dane stage play A Bill of Divorcement (1932; play written 1922). Hepburn would occasionally return to the stage—in her early career, and most notoriously, in the Jed Harris play The Lake, in 1933; and later, more successfully, in the stage version of The Philadelphia Story, in 1939; As You Like It, in 1950; The Millionairess, in 1952; Coco, in 1969 and 1971; A Matter of Gravity, in 1976; and The West Side Waltz, in 1981. But Hepburn was most at home in cinema, as her legendary work with many important filmmakers of the classical era—Cukor, Dorothy Arzner, Frank Capra, Howard Hawks, John Huston, David Lean, and George Stevens, among others—attests. Hepburn is that rare Hollywood star whose importance in popular culture matches her pride of place in academic film studies. She is a crucial presence in both, as numerous popular biographies and an extensive body of literature in academic writing in film studies reveals. Except for a brief section providing an overview of a few key Hepburn biographies and memoirs that will be of interest to the scholar, this bibliography focuses on discussions of Hepburn in academic scholarship.