Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 52: My Day with Katharine Hepburn

So far I've encountered a lot of the great female icons of the era during this search - Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford in Grant Hotel, Bette Davis in Jezebel, Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express and Claudette Colbert in a number of films. However one star has eluded me so far so I decided to watch all three of her nominated films from that decade in one day, that star is Katharine Hepburn.

Although Katharine Hepburn won her first Best Actress Oscar for only her third performance in Morning Glory. The first film that she was in that was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar was George Cukor's adaptation of Little Women that was up for Best Picture at the 1934 ceremony. Most people already know the story of Little Women but if you don't it basically concerns four sisters as they grow up and become women by finding love and independence. In this version it is Hepburn who plays second eldest sister Jo an aspiring playwright who meets the shy Laurie and they begin to fall in love however she rejects his advances and goes to New York to work as a nanny and to concentrate on her writing. Meanwhile of her other sisters Meg gets married, Amy goes off with her auntie and Beth contracts and eventually dies of Scarlet Fever. The end of the film comes full circle as Beth's death reunites the family and Jo discovers that Amy and Laurie have fallen in love and are about to be married so she accepts the proposal of the German linguist who works with the children that she nannies. Approaching this film I only had a smattering of what the story was about, mainly from that episode of Friends where Rachel gets Joey to read it. At first I found this a little hard to grasp and at times I mixed up the non-Hepburn sisters but once it found its stride and the male characters were introduced I really started to enjoy it. Hepburn's regular strong female stance was on display here as Jo, here she never lets her guard down till the very end and anchors the film from beginning to end however I also thought Jean Parker as Beth was particularly compelling and older character actress Edna May Oliver did a good job of portraying the wealthy but harsh aunt of the girls. Overall this was a good literary adaptation and as so won the Adapted Screenplay Oscar and Cukor was nominated for his strong direction. This probably would've made it into the list of nominees had it been five strong but it just wasn't as different and challenging as that year's winner Cavalcade.

Two years later at the 1936 awards Hepburn was nominated for her second Best Actress Oscar for her titular performance in the film Alice Adams. Hepburn here would be unsuccessful losing to Bette Davis for the film Dangerous but for me Alice Adams marked a departure for Hepburn in terms of character, Alice displayed little in terms of bravado and instead was quite weak and understated. The film is all about class as Alice and her mother hope to rise above their lower-middle class status. The family's father is ill in bed and, even though his job at the glue factory has been left open, they have little money. Alice goes to a party and unable to find a job has to go with her smart Alec brother. While there she meets and dances with the dashing Arthur however her lowly class means that she feels she isn't good enough for him. Alice's mother convinces her father to sell an invention for a new type of glue without consulting his business partner and boss essentially meaning he gets called a thief. The finale of the film sees the Adams family host a dinner party with Arthur which is awkward as Alice struggles to make conversation with Arthur while the rest of the family is worried about the consequences of the father's actions. However just when everything seems lost Alice's father and his business partner make up and Alice gets her man, something I found a little far-featched. Despite that finale, Alice Adams was a charming enough picture with another great little performance from Hepburn who is ably supported by Fred MacMurray as Arthur and Frank Albertson as her brother. Again not a film that was ever going to hold a candle to that year's winner Mutiny on The Bounty but again there was nothing particularly wrong with the film.

Hepburn's final Best Picture nominated film came two years later and this time she shared the headline status with Ginger Rogers. This film was Stage Door about a group of aspiring actresses who share a boarding house together with Rogers playing the street-smart dancer and Hepburn the haughty rich-girl newbie who puts everyone's noses out of joint. As well as Hepburn and Roger's characters is Kay Hamilton played by Andrea Leeds a young actress who had won rave reviews for her first performance but was struggling to find enough work to pay for rent and meals. Hamilton's chance comes when she auditions for a show directed by Anthony Powell, a respected director who is pompous and arrogant and refuses to see Hamilton leading to her fainting and Powell getting a tongue-lashing from Hepburn's Terry Randall. However eventually Terry's rich father agrees to finance Powell's show but only if his daughter in the lead role which again means that Randall is an outcast in the boarding house once again. In the end Kay dies and Terry dedicates her performance to her and is eventually forgiven by the rest of the inhabitants. The final scene sees yet another aspiring actress enter the boarding house and life goes on as normal. Out of these three films I think I enjoyed Stage Door the most, the mainly female cast do a great job of everyday banter and you can really believe that they are struggling actresses. Hepburn returns to her strong nature playing the posh girl in a house full of down-to-Earth characters but she really has some good chemistry with Ginger Rogers. Even though Rogers played a small grittier role in 42nd Street this film sees a complete departure from the work she did with Fred Astaire and is great. But it is Andrea Leeds as Kay who was nominated for Supporting Actress that year and that was rightly deserved. Rounding off the cast was Adolphe Menjou again playing a little bit of an unsavoury gentlemen, while some of the smaller parts were taken by actresses who would find fame later on including Lucille Ball, Eve Arden and Ann Miller. Despite this being my favourite of the three films it did the worst at the Box Office and by the end of the 1930s Hepburn along with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire were considered Box Office poison and weren't getting the roles that they once got.

However Hepburn would turn that around and still holds the record for the most Best Actress Oscars but most of those would be awarded in the 1950s and 1960s so for now its goodbye to Miss Hepburn.