‘Plain’ actress who became a record Oscar winner

KATHARINE HEPBURN, who died on Sunday at the age of 96, was the Hollywood icon once labelled “box-office poison” but became one of the 20th century’s greatest actresses.

She had been in declining health in recent years. She died of old age, surrounded by family in her Connecticut home.

With unconventional looks she herself called "plain", she began as an outsider in the film world but she won four Oscars, an all-time record, for her work, which spanned seven decades.

For 25 years she was the lover of her frequent co-star and another of acting's greatest talents, Spencer Tracy, who was to die in her arms, ending one of the great romances of Hollywood's golden age.

Born in 1907 in Hartford, Connecticut, Ms Hepburn was independent from the start, brought up the daughter of a suffragette and a doctor, and helping in the battle for women's voting rights as she grew up.

"I remember as a child going around with 'Votes For Women' balloons. I learnt early what it is to be snubbed for a good cause," she said, but it was her brother's accidental hanging which scarred her upbringing, and for many years she took his birthdate, November 2, as her own.

After graduating from university, she became part of a touring theatre company, following her love of acting, and married her first and only husband, Ludlow Ogden Smith, in 1928. They divorced six years later.

Ms Hepburn's first foray into films set the tone for the future. When RKO Pictures, one of the Hollywood studios, offered her a contract, she demanded $1,500 a week, a huge amount then for a new actress. But they accepted, giving her the role of Sydney Fairfield in A Bill of Divorcement, which became a hit.

With her third film, Morning Glory, in 1933, she won her first Oscar, but at the same time, her unconventional ways started to grate with studio bosses and the public.

She hated publicising films, never posed for pictures or gave interviews and walked around in trousers and without make-up at a time when stars were expected to be perfectly dressed.

And a year after her Oscar, Ms Hepburn's performance in The Lake earned her one of the most famous of Dorothy Parker's quips when she said: "She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B." Although Ms Hepburn later said it was "extremely accurate and funny", in reality it marked the start of a decline, as her marriage ended, her films flopped and she was dubbed "box-office poison".

Undeterred, Ms Hepburn soldiered on, sticking to a philosophy she later summed up as: "If you always do what interests you, at least one person is pleased". One of her next films, Bringing Up Baby, later came to be recognised as a classic.

She missed out on the part of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind and returned to the stage for The Philadelphia Story, bringing it to the big screen and coming back to critical acclaim with an Oscar nomination.

It led to a film which would change her life, Woman of the Year, when she met Spencer Tracy, a Hollywood icon who became her lover, but who would never divorce his first wife.

The two went on to star together in Keeper of the Flames, Without Love, The World and His Wife, Adam's Rib and His Other Woman as their romance continued.

As she passed 40, her star began to fade, but rather than taking any part she could, Ms Hepburn held out for the best, with Adam's Rib in 1949, The African Queen, alongside Humphrey Bogart in 1950, and then just six more in the 1950s, among them Suddenly, Last Summer, with Elizabeth Taylor.

The strategy did not make her fabulously rich.

However, it gained her continuing critical acclaim, which she laughed off, saying: "People have grown fond of me, like some old building."

In 1962, she made Long Day's Journey Into Night, and in 1967, she teamed up for a last time with Tracy for Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, earning a second Oscar but it was marred by the death of Mr Tracy just after the film was completed.

A year later she won her third Oscar, for The Lion In Winter, and she slowed her pace, appearing in a few made-for-television pictures in the 1970s.

But in 1981, she won her fourth Oscar for her role alongside Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, taking the record for the number of Oscars and number of nominations 12 and becoming a true Hollywood legend.

She herself had little time for awards, saying: "I can't say I believe in prizes. I was a whiz in the three-legged race that's something you can win."

In 1991, she published her autobiography, called simply Me, and three years later, had her last big-screen appearance, in Love Affair, alongside Warren Beatty.

According to Cynthia McFadden, a close friend and executor of her estate, Ms Hepburn's wishes were that there be no memorial service and burial will be private at a later date.