Hollywood star Katharine Hepburn will be the focus today of the Durham Museum’s lunchtime lecture, “Katharine Hepburn: Master of Her Own Image.”
Amy Henderson of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery will speak at noon in the Sorrell Center, Room 2018.
Bursting into the Hollywood dream factory, Katharine Hepburn was an ironic misfit, sporting a highly-stylized personality and headstrong independence that boldly announced a new kind of female presence on the silver screen. She was clearly not another platinum blonde, nor a screen siren wrapped in sequins and ostrich feathers.
The Katharine Hepburn who became an American icon was an original — and to a large degree, a product of pure self-invention. For it was Hepburn herself who carefully constructed and maintained her own myth and image from her earliest days in Hollywood, and through nearly 70 years on stage, screen, and television.
A vivid, untamable creature, she was truly a star. As she once said, “Show me an actress who isn’t a personality, and you’ll show me a woman who isn’t a star.”
The lecture is offered through the Time Travelers partnership, which provides free museum admission for UNMC and Nebraska Medicine employees, students and their immediate families, with valid identification. The partnership also offers lectures, workshops and other events on the medical center campus.