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Today is Katharine Hepburn 's 119th birthday. From her motion picture debut in A Bill of Divorcement (1932) to iconic performances in such films as Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), The African Queen (1951), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) and On Golden Pond (1981), she had a career like no other. She won four Academy Awards, the most out of any other performer, and got nominated for eight more. She was intelligent, headstrong, independent and outspoken, at a time when women were generally regarded as being the opposite. She was always unapologetically herself; there were no airs about her, no pretense, no façade. She was always just Kate. This is her life in photos. At the age of four, in 1911.   With fellow Bryn Mawr students Margaret Barker (left) and Elizabeth Stewart (middle) in a production of A. A. Milne's The Truth About Blayds , in April 1927.    In costume for the Broadway play The Lake , in November 1934.    With Ginge...

The Golden Age of Hollywood was all about the glitz and glamour. Movie stars were fashion icons, western heroes, brooding outsiders, average Joes, and femme fatales. Some had careers that spanned decades, others were short-lived in their success, and most of them were no strangers to scandal. In such crazy times as these, there are bound to exist some wild facts about the stars and films that made Old Hollywood legendary. I've rounded up 10 of them. In all honesty, they're not really «wild» facts; they're more like random, useless tidbits. 1. When Clark Gable appeared without an undershirt in It Happened One Night (1934), women across the nation stopped buying the garment for their husbands. This caused a depression in undershirts in the United States in the 1930s. In 1957, Gable said, «I didn't know what I was doing to the undershirt people. That was just the way I lived. I hadn't worn an undershirt since I'd started school. They made me feel hemmed in and...

In honour of Katharine Hepburn's 109th birthday, which was yesterday, this week on «Film Friday» I have decided to bring you one of her best-remembered films. This also happens to be one of my personal favourite films, classic or otherwise. Directed by John Huston, The African Queen (1951) begins at the outbreak of World War I in a small village in German East Africa, where the Reverend Samuel Sayer (Robert Morley) and his spinster sister, Rose (Katharine Hepburn), work as Methodist missionaries. The Sayers' only link to the outside world is Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart), a drunken Canadian boat captain who brings them mail and supplies from their native England aboard his tramp streamer, the African Queen . When German troops invade the mission village, Samuel is wounded and soon succumbs to jungle fever. Shortly afterwards, Charlie returns to help the grieving Rose bury her brother, and the two then set off downriver in the African Queen . During their tribulated journe...