Rating: 
Summary: A great actress & a great biographer!
Review: Barbara Leaming has written on the lives of some of the most luminous Hollywood personalities there are, including Orson Welles and Rita Heyworth. Her biography of Katharine Hepburn once again shows her ability to reveal the motivations and drives behind her subject while remaining a sympathetic observer. She treats Hepburn's childhood, her adult years and her involvements with famous, powerful men (John Ford and Spencer Tracy, to name two of the better-known lovers), that independent spirit, and her quixotic but huge theatrical and film talent and the very unordinary family life she enjoyed while growing up fairly and with great detail. Leaming gives us a portrait of a complex and brilliant artist of stage and screen who is larger than life, yet down to it as well, a glamourous Yankee with sensibility, common sense and charm to match. Very readable and very entertaining, Leaming's biography of Ms. Hepburn ranks against that of writer Anne Edwards - all fans of Ms. K. would do well to turn its pages.
Rating:
Summary: A great actress & a great biographer!
Review: Barbara Leaming has written on the lives of some of the most luminous Hollywood personalities there are, including Orson Welles and Rita Heyworth. Her biography of Katharine Hepburn once again shows her ability to reveal the motivations and drives behind her subject while remaining a sympathetic observer. She treats Hepburn's childhood, her adult years and her involvements with famous, powerful men (John Ford and Spencer Tracy, to name two of the better-known lovers), that independent spirit, and her quixotic but huge theatrical and film talent and the very unordinary family life she enjoyed while growing up fairly and with great detail. Leaming gives us a portrait of a complex and brilliant artist of stage and screen who is larger than life, yet down to it as well, a glamourous Yankee with sensibility, common sense and charm to match. Very readable and very entertaining, Leaming's biography of Ms. Hepburn ranks against that of writer Anne Edwards - all fans of Ms. K. would do well to turn its pages.
Rating: 
Summary: Katharine Hepburn's Family History
Review: Being a big fan of Katharine Hepburn, I was really looking forward to reading this book. Although it was very interesting to read about her family history, which was hardly mentioned in Ms. Hepburn's autobiography "Me", I was hoping to get more information about Ms. Hepburn, her career and social life. The author, Ms. Leaming, apparently had enough diligence to research as far back as 1892 that researching information from the 1920's through the present on Ms. Hepburn should not have been so difficult. The material on Ms. Hepburn's past did give new insight on her personality. Now it is easy to see why she did not mention this information in her autobiography--she was raised never to speak about such things. It was also amazing to read how such a powerfully independent personality could submit herself to such degredation and humilation as she did with Spencer Tracy. This book does shed new light on Katharine Hepburn but, most of that new light is focused on other members of her family.
Rating: 
Summary: Astonishingly mediocre
Review: For me, Katharine Hepburn was one of the great screen actresses of the 20th century; her work in LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT is harrowing. After an earlier career as a comedienne and leading lady, she began doing extremely difficult character work in motion picture adaptions of Tennesse Williams plays and others. Her later work was brilliant. But the book only alludes to her flowering as a great tragic actress and instead focuses, as all Hepburn bios must, on her romance with Spencer Tracy and other men who were either married or not able to bring Kate to her knees. As a person, I find Hepburn to be unbearable, or, more kindly, bull-headed and aggresive. I guess this makes her a feminist hero. But it's interesting that bios of Hepburn, for all the nods to how proto-feminist she was, still focus on her love life whereas discussions of Bette Davis (her equal in talent and personal strength) focus more on her work and how determined she was, career-wise. Personally, I find Hepburn's work much more inspiring than her relations with a married man and would like to see a critical discussion of her distinguished career.
Rating:
Summary: Astonishingly excellent biography!
Review: I don't read biographies of movie stars. I happened to pick this up and read a few pages and I was absolutely hooked. Barbara Leaming, the author, is obviously a trained scholar and it shows. She has done thorough research and set the research in the context of the time. Please don't think though that this biography is a dreary academic exercise with forests of footnotes and the like. No way. It is vividly written and riveting. The first section of the book traces Hepburn's family history--a tragic one. And, by examining the lives of Hepburn's mother and aunt, Leaming presents a good overview of the women's rights movement in the early 20th century. I hope I don't offend any of Hepburn's fans if I express the wish that Leaming use her remarkable talents on a biography of a more significant historical figure
Rating:
Summary: Insightful and Well-Written
Review: I found Barbara Leaming's biography of Katharine Hepburn to be unique in that it does not begin immediately with Hepburn's birth. Instead, it starts with her mother and grandmother, and her father and uncles. In doing so, Leaming allows the reader, throughout the course of the book, to come to a better understanding of Hepburn psychologically, as opposed to just presenting facts related to career and private life. The bulk of the biography is devoted to Hepburn's relationships, including those with Howard Hughes, John Ford, Leland Hayward, and, of course, Spencer Tracy. For one more interested in details of Hepburn's historic career, this is not the most insightful book. But for those wanting a peek into the mystique that is the Great Kate, Leaming's biography is tantalizing and absorbing.
Rating: 
Summary: The most inaccurate book every written about Hepburn
Review: This is easily the worst biography ever written about Katharine Hepburn. It is full of inaccuracies and wild speculations. The author's central theme is that Ms. Hepburn had a life long, unrequited love for the director John Ford. Anyone who has read any of Katharine Hepburn's own books and her many interviews know that this is simply not true. Having fabricated the fictional relationship between Katharine Hepburn and John Ford, the author then uses it to denigrate Hepburn's real long time love, Spencer Tracy. Leaming makes incredibly scurrilous and completely undocumented statements about Tracy such as that his supposed veneral disease caused his son's deafness. Ms. Leaming fails to offer even one iota of evidence for this outrageous statement. Page after page of this book is full of wildly fanceful speculations passed off as fact. What are we to make of the following passage at page 393: "If Tracy wondered whether, or how Ford would react to news of the affair with Kate, he did not have to wait long to find out. On September 3, five days after shooting on Woman of the Year began, Ford suddenly left town under mysterious circumstances. . . .Ostensibly, Ford's sudden, rather theatrical departure had nothing to do with Kate. Still, there can be no question that it shadowed her relationship with Tracy from the start. A man of Tracy's tormented and deeply suspicious nature could never accept that Ford's timing had been purely coincidental. . . . " So, according to Ms. Leaming, John Ford left Los Angeles and joined the military because he was upset that Katharine Hepburn had become involved with Spencer Tracy and further she asserts that Spencer Tracy knew this and was 'tormented' by it. How silly can one author get? What I find passing strange is all the positive reviews that were given to this book by presumably reputable reviewers. I can only assume that the reviewers don't actually read the books they review or that they knew so little about Ms. Hepburn's life that they concluded that the book was accurate even though it has so many obvious inaccuracies.
Rating: 
Summary: A thoroughly well researched, document and insightful Read
Review: This is the most fascinating book about Hepburn to read, and I've read most of them stretching back over 20 years. It is exhaustively researched, with sources for each and every fact and assertion made. . .if only other biographers (or todays reporters) were so meticulous. While some might be surprised by the contents of the book, the multi-faceted truth about Hepburn's relationship with Tracey, you still come away in awed wonder of a great and pioneering woman. There was a great deal of trauma in her life and she still perservered, a tremendous testament to how strong she truly was-- a true female role model with human flaws and needs.
Rating:
Summary: A thoroughly well researched, document and insightful Read
Review: This is the most fascinating book about Hepburn to read, and I've read most of them stretching back over 20 years. It is exhaustively researched, with sources for each and every fact and assertion made. . .if only other biographers (or todays reporters) were so meticulous. While some might be surprised by the contents of the book, the multi-faceted truth about Hepburn's relationship with Tracey, you still come away in awed wonder of a great and pioneering woman. There was a great deal of trauma in her life and she still perservered, a tremendous testament to how strong she truly was-- a true female role model with human flaws and needs.
Rating:
Summary: Enthusiastically recommended reading for Hepburn fans
Review: To create an accurate, comprehensive, and revealing life story of Katharine Hepburn, biographer Barbara Leaming drew upon years of painstaking research that included her private correspondence and letters of her family and associates who knew her best. Her childhood was marked by the discovery of her brother Tom's suicide by hanging when she was 13 years old. But she was able to emerge from a troubled family background (her maternal grandfather also died a suicide in 1892), because of support from the strong women of her family, especially her mother who helped lead the women's suffrage movement of the time. This outstanding biography delves deeply into Hepburn's acting career from Broadway to Hollywood, her long affair with Spencer Tracy, and her relationships with John Ford, H. Phelps Putnam, and others. Katherine Hepburn is enthusiastically recommended reading for Hepburn fans and students of theatrical history and cinematic studies.
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