Hepburn was renowned for her partnership with Tracy, but her double-act with Cary Grant was just as polished. Hepburn is Ann, a naive young woman who, scared of being left on the shelf, has rushed into marriage with the superficially charming Alan Garroway (Robert Taylor), only to find that he is angry, moody and paranoid about his young brother, Michael (played by Robert Mitchum), who has gone missing. The film is a marital nightmare of obsession, like Rebecca or Gaslight. This cult noir melodrama from Vincente Minnelli is growing in esteem among Hepburn fans, not least because she plays (against type) someone who is variously aghast, submissive, romantic and demure – closer to the kind of role that might be given to Ingrid Bergman. Hepburn and Robert Taylor in Undercurrent. They crack wise at Hepburn’s expense and she replies airily: “Evidently, you’re a very amusing person.” But she wins their respect and love in the end. They are highly suspicious of Hepburn, whom they see as a rich phoney-baloney slumming it while they need the money. The setting is a ladies’ theatrical rooming house called the Footlights Club, where the unemployed women are always gossiping and back-talking. Hepburn is the stagestruck heiress holding her own against tough broads Ginger Rogers and Lucille Ball in this zinging, fast-talking comedy about women in the theatre. This was the first movie that showed audiences her forthright, unconventional, even slightly tomboyish manner (wrongly described as “eccentric”): the patrician confidence, the gift for comedy and that unmistakable Bryn Mawr voice, the vibrato quaver of which would grow with age. On her way to the top, she has zany romantic adventures with a roguish middle-aged producer, played by Adolphe Menjou, and a handsome playwright, played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. She plays Eva Lovelace, a small-town gal who dreams of Broadway, but finds New York a tough place to be.

Morning Glory (1933)Īt 26, Hepburn picked up her first Oscar for this movie about the eternal magic of showbusiness. Then the company brings in a smug computer expert, Richard Sumner, played by Tracy, to streamline the data handling (as no one used to say in 1957) with bleeping machines. Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, who is that sexiest of things, a librarian – at a TV company, efficiently retrieving all manner of facts and stats from old-fashioned books. Photograph: Allstar/20th Century FoxĪ madcap 50s office party of a movie, with Hepburn giving it her full imperious hauteur, written for the screen by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, parents of Nora, Delia, Hallie and Amy.

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