14-05-2025
Katharine Hepburn's shock claim about gender identity resurfaces after admitting to having male 'alter ego'
Actress Katharine Hepburn's shock claims about gender identity laid bare in recently resurfaced interview.
The star, best known for her roles in Bringing Up Baby and Suddenly, Last Summer, became synonymous with wearing pants long before it was socially acceptable for women to do so.
She famously rejected the frills and expectations of femininity during the height of Old Hollywood.
In a resurfaced 1999 interview with Katie Couric, the actress, who called herself a feminist, discussed her tomboy childhood and revealed that she 'hated being a girl.'
'I was called Jimmy and I hated being a girl. I really hated it,' she explained.
'I had three brothers, and I just shaved my head and thought "I'm a boy."'
Katharine, who died in 2003, said she had her hair shaved until she was 12 or 13 - adding that her parents 'thought it was great because they didn't have to brush my hair or wash it.'
In another interview, the star explained that she would often wear her older brothers' clothes.
'I had a phase as a child when I wished I was a boy because I thought boys had all the fun,' she told biographer Charlotte Chandler, in I Know Where I'm Going: Katharine Hepburn: A Personal Biography, per Vanity Fair.
'I did wish I could be a boy, so I decided I wanted people to call me Jimmy.
'I just liked the name Jimmy. I told my family I wanted to be called Jimmy.'
However, Katharine said her alter ego was just another role.
'I created Jimmy for the others. Inside, I never felt like Jimmy,' she detailed.
Katharine was always considered a force of nature.
George Cukor, who directed Hepburn's first screen performance in A Bill of Divorcement in 1932, and who went on to be a lifelong friend, said of the actress: 'The audience had never seen a girl like that — she seemed to bark at them,' he said, per the outlet.
'She didn't play for sympathy at all. At first, the audience wasn't quite sure whether it liked her or not.'
For her work in the 1935 film Alice Adams, director George Stevens had to teach her to do love scenes because, 'she had always thought that to play a love scene with a man involved standing up straight and talking to him strong, eye to eye.'
Director Dorothy Arzner tried to make Katharine appear more feminine in 1933's flick called Christopher Strong, but she said: 'Kate wasn't someone you could mold easily, that you could control.'
She added to Charles Higham, biographer of Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn: 'She was extremely strong-willed. Her tone was all wrong; I had to soften her constantly.'
When Katharine was wearing pants in the 1930s, women's fashion was still tightly bound by rigid gender norms.
The sweeping changes of World War II, when women stepped into factory jobs and military roles, hadn't arrived yet.
At the time, a woman could be arrested for wearing pants in public and charged with 'masquerading as a man.' Katharine Hepburn, ever defiant, wore pants anyway.
'I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man,' the actress told Barbara Walters in 1981.
'I've just done what I damn well wanted to and I made enough money to support myself, and I ain't afraid of being alone.'
