Today begins a new project for me – that of profiling major Oscar winners and losers and some who were never nominated but should have been.

We begin with Katharine Hepburn, the all-time champion acting winner with twelve nominations and four wins.  Meryl Streep may have passed her in nominations, but no other performer has won as many times.  Walter Brennan, Ingrid Bergman and Jack Nicholson come close with three wins each.

Born in 1907, the daughter of a prominent Connecticut doctor and a noted suffragette, Hepburn had a brief stage career before making her film debut in 1932’s A Bill of Divorcement opposite John Barrymore.  She remained a star throughout her career, making her last appearances on screen in 1994’s Love Affair and the same year’s TV movie, One Christmas when she was 87.  She died in 2003 at 96.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

LITTLE WOMEN (1933), directed by George Cukor

Hepburn won her first Oscar playing an aspiring actress in 1933’s Morning Glory, but she should have been nominated and won for Little Women, the first talkie version of Louisa May Alcott’s classic 1868 novel.

Based on Alcott’s own family in Concord, Massachusetts during and immediately following the Civil War, the central character of Jo, played by Hepburn, was based on Alcott herself.  The film features many fine performances including those of Joan Bennett, Frances Dee and Jean Parker as her sisters, Spring Byington as her kindly mother, Edna May Oliver as her stern aunt, Douglass Montgomery as the boy she loves but who marries one of her sisters and Paul Lukas as the scholarly professor she comes to love in the end, but it is Hepburn’s portrayal of Jo that carries the film and makes it special.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940), directed by George Cukor

By the late 1930s Hepburn fell out of favor with the movie-going public.  Even her best films such as 1938’s Bringing Up Baby and Holiday failed to make money.  She was labeled box-office poison in the press and left the movie business to return to the Broadway stage where she triumphed in the sophisticated comedy, The Philadelphia Story, heading a cast that included Joseph Cotten, Van Heflin and Shirley Booth.  All the major studios wanted to buy the property for their reigning stars, but Hepburn, with the help of Howard Hughes, bought the property for herself and sold it to MGM with the proviso that she star in it with co-stars of her choosing.

Hepburn got her first choice of Cary Grant for Joseph Cotten’s role, but first choice Spencer Tracy was unavailable for Van Heflin’s so she settled on James Stewart.  Ruth Hussey was given Shirley Booth’s role.

The film was a major triumph for all concerned.  Hepburn won her only New York Film Critics’ award as the headstrong heiress balancing three men and received the third of her twelve Oscar nominations.  Stewart, in the secondary male lead as the reporter who falls head over heels for Hepburn, won the Oscar for Best Actor and Hussey as the photographer who loves him was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.  Grant, who was equally good, was overlooked as he would be for all his comedy roles.  Hepburn, who was nominated for the third time, should have won her second Oscar for this, but lost to Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle.

SUMMERTIME (1955), directed by David Lean

After playing mostly glamorous romantic leads for nearly two decades, Hepburn embarked on a series of spinster roles in the 1950s beginning with her English missionary in 1951’s The African Queen opposite Humphrey Bogart.  The best of these, however, was her middle aged secretary from middle America who spends her life savings on a vacation in Venice before settling down to a presumed life of further spinsterhood.

Hepburn simply glows in the role from beginning to end, falling briefly in love with heartthrob Rossano Brazzi who turns out to be married with a teenage son.  The third star of the film is the City of Venice itself, beautifully photographed by Lean and his cinematographer, Jack Hildyard, but it’s Hepburn’s magnificent acting that you remember – a look here, a glance there and that enigmatic smile as she frantically waves goodbye from a train not too successfully hiding her breaking heart.  This one earned Hepburn her sixth Oscar nomination.  She lost to Anna Magnani in The Rose Tattoo, but I’ve always preferred Hepburn’s American-in-Italy to Magnani’s Italian-in-America and think she should have won her third Oscar for this.

LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT (1962), directed by Sidney Lumet

After a brief break from films during which she successfully appeared on stage, primarily in Shakespearean roles, Hepburn returned to the screen in one of the most famous stage adaptations, that of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night.

The main character in the play is that of O’Neill’s miserly actor father, played in the film by Ralph Richardson.  The film is a word for word translation of the play, but by Lumet and his cinematographer, Boris Kaufman,  focusing the camera on Hepburn as the mother, Hepburn uncannily becomes the central character by sheer force of personality.  Though Richardson is brilliant, as are Jason Robards as the alcoholic older son and Dean Stockwell as the consumptive younger son based on O’Neill himself, it is Hepburn who dominates the film as the drug-addicted mother.  She won her ninth Oscar nomination for it but lost the Oscar to Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker.  Though Bancroft was a worthy winner, I’ve always thought Hepburn should have gotten her fourth Oscar for this.

THE LION IN WINTER (1968), directed by Anthony Harvey

Hepburn finally won her second Oscar 35 years after her first for 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.  It was basically a sentimental award for a nice, but hardly taxing performance, as would be her fourth for 1981’s On Golden Pond.  In the meantime, however, we have her brilliant Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter, the only one of her four Oscars she actually deserved to win, though it should have been her fifth, not her third.

Hepburn’s Eleanor is a force to be reckoned with as the Queen in Exile reunited with her family for a Christmas of sparring in 1183.  With a witty script by James Goldman worthy of Oscar Wilde at his best, Hepburn and Peter O’Toole, reprising his role from Becket as Henry II, spew forth non-stop verbal attacks on one another in their battle of wits to name Henry’s successor.

Henry won’t commit but clearly favors youngest son John (Nigel Terry), while Eleanor favors oldest son Richard (the Lionheart) (Anthony Hopkins), and no one wants middle son Geoffrey (John Castle).  There are subplots involving Henry’s mistress Alys (Jane Merrow) and Philip, the young King of Spain (Timothy Dalton) with whom Richard has had a clandestine sexual affair, but the driving forces of the film are Hepburn and O’Toole at their sparkling best, brilliantly accompanied by John Barry’s constantly pulsating score.

Katharine Hepburn’s Oscar nominations:

• Morning Glory (1932/33) [Oscar]
• Alice Adams (1935)
• The Philadelphia Story (1940)
• Woman of the Year (1942)
• The African Queen (1951)
• Summertime (1955)
• The Rainmaker (1956)
• Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)
• Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962)
• Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) [Oscar]
• The Lion in Winter (1968) [Oscar]
• On Golden Pond (1981) [Oscar]