Katharine Hepburn
2017
Actor · Feminist · Atheist
Katharine Hepburn has been rated the best actress of the 20th Century, with four Oscars (Academy Awards) for Best Actress: 1933, 1968, 1969, and again in 1982. The 1982 award was for On Golden Pond, for which she also won several other awards, including the American Movie Award for Best Actress (in 1981).
She received a number of awards outside of acting over the years. In 1986, the Council of Fashion Designers of America gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award, as did other better-known organizations, including BAFTA (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, and On Golden Pond). Especially exciting was her Kennedy Center Honors award (1990).
Regardless of exposure to all the excitement in her life, Katharine Hepburn’s expectations were relatively modest, as exemplified by her comments:
If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.
And:
I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.
“Just being” is consistent with her lifetime non-belief in the supernatural; that is, with freethought. Not surprisingly, her name appears in lists of famous atheists, nonbelievers, “nones,” etc.
Hepburn’s early acting was with live-theatre plays, where in many cases her roles were classical, (e.g., Shakespearian, rather than contemporary). As she was living in Connecticut (with her parents), many of her performances (starting in 1928) were in local theatres, or in New York. For a while, things did not go well. She was a student at Bryn Mawr, where she was getting low grades. She might have left, if her parents had not paid for her to go back and try again. Second time around led to improvement and, thanks to George Cukor, in 1932 she secured a movie role in the now famous A Bill of Divorcement. From then on, she acted in both theatre and movies. A few of the theatre performances were also put on tour, through the U.S., Australia, and the North of England.
A discussion of Katharine Hepburn is not complete without something about the “Tracy and Hepburn” era. They appeared together in quite a few movies and their surnames were both very prominently displayed above the movie title on theatre marquees. More interestingly, they were lovers for 26 years. Their instant inseparability evolved into a 26-year romance, which ended tragically in 1967 shortly after the release of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
Her influence extended into the secular community as well, having been recognized by the American Humanist Association in 1985. She was bestowed the Humanist Arts Award of that year.
In 1991, Hepburn told a journalist:
I’m an atheist, and that’s it. I believe there's nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.
Later in life she openly promoted birth control and supported the pro-choice movement, and throughout her life was credited for breaking the mold of women in Hollywood, bringing strong-willed women to the big screen.