thursday 13: facts about Katharine Hepburn

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My all-time favorite actress is Katharine Hepburn. I’ve loved her since I was a child, so I thought I’d make a fangirly list of facts about her!

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1. Academy Award nominations

Until Meryl Streep, Kate held the record for the most Academy Award nominations with 12. The record was set in 1981, with a Best Actress nom for On Golden Pond. This is a movie I’ve seen an incalculable number of times. She held the record until 2002, when Streep got her 13th nomination of a supporting role in Adaptation.

2. Academy Award wins

Kate still holds the record for actual Academy Award wins with four. She won for Morning Glory in 1932/33, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in 1967, The Lion in Winter in 1968, and On Golden Pond in 1981.

3. pour me a whiskey

Kate held that regularly drinking whiskey helped control the tremors she’d inherited from her father. But she rarely drank while she was with Spencer Tracy, who was an alcoholic.

4. Kate and Spencer

For decades, Kate was the other woman in an affair with Spencer Tracy. It was more than an illicit fling, however. She lived with him for 27 years, taking care of him in his later years. Over the years, they did nine movies together, with their last, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, wrapping just a few weeks before Tracy died. This one is my favorite of the nine.

5. box office poison

In 1938, the Independent Theater Owner’s Association of New York included Kate on a list of actors they called “box office poison” after a handful of her movies flopped in the early to mid-1930s. Some of those “flops” became some of her most beloved movies by fans. One of those so-called flops was Bringing Up Baby, which is now one of those beloved movies.

6. beefing with Ginger

Kate once had beef with Ginger Rogers, supposedly out of jealousy. Rumor has it that Kate’s then-current beau, Howard Hughes, had shown a little too much interest in Ginger. Whatever the reason for it, Kate dumped a cup of water on Ginger’s new mink coat while on the set of Stage Door.

7. The calla lilies are in bloom again, such a strange flower, suitable to any occasion…

This line originally came from the play The Lake, a British play first presented in March of 1933 in London’s West End. When it came to Broadway in September of the same year, Kate was cast in the production. It ran for only 55 days, and it was considered a flop, with Kate receiving many bad reviews. It was so bad that she paid the director to close the production, feeling as if the director was at fault. In a callback to her biggest failure, Kate included the line in the movie Stage Door. In that, it is part of a deeply emotional speech. I have a tattoo of a calla lily in homage to it.

9. sad childhood moments

When Kate was just 13, she found her older brother (15) Tom hanging from the rafters. Her family believed it was an attempt at a magic trick gone tragically awry, as there had been other similar incidents. But it was a tragic addition to a legacy of suicide in her family, having already lost two uncles, her grandfather, and a great-uncle to it.

10. Mom, the suffragette

Kate’s mother was an early suffragette who advocate for birth control. Her mother’s influence was obvious in how Kate saw the world and how she lived her life. She was fiercely confident and independent before her time, with a deep aversion to what she saw as forced femininity.

11. the tomboy and the glamour girl

Despite the movie glamour, this aversion lasted throughout her life, eschewing feminine trappings for the comfort of pants long before that was done. When she was a child, one summer, she cut off her hair and insisted everyone call her Jimmy.

12. fashionista

Kate’s famous fashion was finally recognized in 1986 when the Council of Fashion Designers of America bestowed her with a lifetime achievement award.

13. a lifetime of icky eyes

Filming of her movie Summertime took place on location in Venice over the course of the summer of 1954. In the movie, there is a scene in which Kate’s character has to fall into a canal. At the time, Kate was concerned about the cleanliness of the canal and didn’t want to do the stunt. But the director insisted that it would be too obvious to use a stunt double. So his idea was to fill the water with disinfectant (I’m sure that was environmentally sound), which then foamed. This didn’t reassure Kate, but she eventually did it. The scene was filmed four times before he was satisfied.

To protect her skin, she was coated with Vaseline, but later that day, her eyes begin to itch and water severely. Eventually, she was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of conjunctivitis that stayed with her for the rest of her life. She was 47 at the time of filming, so she lived with this until her death at 96, almost 49 years.