Why did Katharine Hepburn only attend the Oscars once?
Katharine Hepburn won four Academy Awards throughout her six-decade career, which means that more than two decades after her death, she still holds the record. Only six actors have earned three Oscars – Daniel Day-Lewis, Frances McDormand, Meryl Streep, Jack Nicholson, Ingrid Bergman, and Walter Brennan – and given that only four of them are still alive and two have retired, it seems fairly likely that Hepburn will continue to be the record-holder for years to come.
Hepburn won the awards across a 48-year span, beginning in 1934 with Morning Glory and ending in 1982 with On Golden Pond. She earned the other two from 1967’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and 1968’s The Lion in Winter. She also managed to fit in another eight nominations in that time.
Many actors grow up dreaming about standing on stage at the Oscars in front of a crowd of their peers to accept the greatest award in show business, but Hepburn apparently did not. In fact, she didn’t even bother to show up to collect her awards. She only attended the ceremony once, and despite the fact that she was nominated 12 times, the year she turned up was a year in which she was not in the running for a statuette.
The actor maintained for much of her career that she simply wasn’t interested in the awards. She even famously stated, “My prize is my work.” But late in life, she shared a more relatable reason for staying home. “If I sit here in my chair where I must be honest with myself so that I’ll progress and my character will improve,” she said, “Why don’t I go to the Academy Awards? It has to be that I’m afraid I’m going to lose.” In her usual straightforward manner, she was unsympathetic towards herself. “I don’t approve of my attitude of not going,” she said. “I think that’s cheap of me. Second rate. Second rate not to go.”
The one time Hepburn decided to attend the ceremony was in 1974 to present the Irving G Thalberg Memorial Award to her friend, the producer Lawrence Weingarten. She strode out on stage dressed in her customary trousers and gardening clogs. Standing at the podium, she quipped, “I’m living proof that a person can wait 41 years to be unselfish.”
Who accepted Katharine Hepburn’s Oscars?
Given her absence at so many ceremonies in which she was nominated, Hepburn must have called in a lot of favours to get people to accept the hardware on her behalf. Her long-time friend, director George Cukor, accepted her award for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. The following year, when she won for The Lion in Winter, it was Anthony Harvey, the director of the film, who accepted the award on her behalf.
When she broke the record to become the actor with the most Oscars of all time for On Golden Pond, Hepburn was performing on Broadway, and it was Jon Voight, the presenter of the ‘Best Actress’ category, who addressed the crowd in her stead.
“I’ll dispense with the [cue] cards and just say that I don’t think that there’s anyone here or watching who doesn’t appreciate the amount of love and gratitude represented by this Oscar selection tonight,” he said. “We all send our love to Katharine.”
