A fiery Scots-Yankee known for her intelligence, humor and steely determination, Katharine Hepburn demonstrated remarkable staying power in a film career that spanned more than six decades, winning three of her four Oscar for best actress after age 60. Credit goes to his extraordinary parents, a well-known urologist father, who at great professional risk brought the facts about venereal disease to a wider audience, and to his devoted suffragette wife (an early advocate of birth control), for providing an eccentric, gentlemanly upbringing that emphasized Spartan physical discipline. From the melting pot of Connecticut emerged a strong, outspoken and original personality who would become one of the nation's most admired and beloved actresses. Hepburn made it more through intelligence than beauty, though she was certainly not unattractive, and her strength of character, high moral fiber and regal poise were enduring qualities that continued to give her choice parts as she aged. After graduating from Bryn Mawr College in 1928, Hepburn embarked on a stage career, making her professional debut as a lady-in-waiting in a Baltimore production of "The Tsarina." In November 1928 she gained attention on Broadway as a wealthy student in "These Days," but her subsequent years on the boards passed relatively uneventfully, except for her propensity to clash with directors and crew, resulting in her firing from the projects. It was an update of "Lysistrata", Broadway's "The Warrior's Husband" (1932), which led to a film contract with RKO, and Typhoon Kate burst into Hollywood, intent on turning it upside down, alienating almost everyone with her arrogance. Despite deeming her antics "subcollegiate idiotic," director George Cukor cast Hepburn in his first film, "A Bill of Divorcement" (1932), and her great discovery would repay his trust and generosity in a collaboration that it included eight feature films and two television series. films, containing some of his best work for the screen. The young Hepburn was a creature of enormous imaginative power and flamboyant education, whose magically compelling performance as a stage-struck young girl in her third film, "Morning Glory" (1933), earned her the first of her four Oscars (in a record 12 nominations). Some of her early roles in films such as Cukor's "Little Women" (1933) and Gregory La Cava's "Stage Door" (1937), both depicting women in mutually supportive relationships, anticipated feminist concerns. Cukor's "Sylvia Scarlett" (1936), in which Hepburn disguises herself as a boy for much of the film, was perhaps the most notable early example of the androgyny that runs through Hepburn's career and a revolutionary film for its undermining of the norms of socially constructed lives. femininity and masculinity.