In an acting career that spanned nearly six decades, Katharine Hepburn set the bar for smart, sophisticated roles that seemed to echo the woman that she was— and, in doing so, won four Academy Awards for Best Actress, still a record for any performer, and was nominated 12 times for an Oscar (Meryl Streep would finally beat it with her 13th nomination, for Adaption, in 2002).
A member of the Junior League of Hartford, where she was born, she shunned the Hollywood publicity machine and refused to try to live up to …