# What is the best Katharine Hepburn role?

> Four Academy Awards, nine nominations, and a career spanning six decades — she was Hollywood's most independent and defiant leading lady. Which performance is the greatest of them all?

*By YPB Team · Published April 10, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-katharine-hepburn-role*

---

## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Philadelphia Story**
   A 1940 romantic comedy in which Hepburn plays a sharp-tongued socialite whose remarriage is complicated by her ex-husband, a role she originated on Broadway to reclaim her Hollywood stardom.
2. **The African Queen**
   A 1951 adventure in which Hepburn plays a prim missionary who joins forces with a rough-edged riverboat captain played by Humphrey Bogart to navigate a dangerous African river during WWI.
3. **The Lion in Winter**
   A 1968 historical drama in which Hepburn won her third Academy Award playing the imprisoned Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine battling wits with King Henry II (Peter O'Toole).
4. **On Golden Pond**
   A 1981 drama in which Hepburn earned her record fourth Oscar as a warm, resilient wife mediating between her curmudgeonly husband (Henry Fonda) and their estranged daughter.
5. **Guess Who's Coming to Dinner**
   A 1967 landmark film in which Hepburn won her second Oscar as a progressive mother who must truly test her liberal values when her daughter brings home a Black fiancé.
6. **Bringing Up Baby**
   A 1938 screwball comedy masterpiece in which Hepburn plays a free-spirited heiress whose pet leopard upends the life of a buttoned-up paleontologist (Cary Grant).
7. **Morning Glory**
   A 1933 drama in which Hepburn's debut Oscar-winning performance as a starstruck young actress determined to make it on Broadway announced the arrival of a major talent.
8. **Little Women**
   A 1933 adaptation in which Hepburn's tomboyish, fiercely independent portrayal of Jo March set the gold standard for the role.
9. **Long Day's Journey into Night**
   A 1962 Eugene O'Neill adaptation in which Hepburn's portrayal of a morphine-addicted matriarch is considered among the most demanding roles in American drama.
10. **Suddenly, Last Summer**
   A 1959 drama in which Hepburn is chillingly brilliant as a wealthy, manipulative widow who schemes to have her niece lobotomized, sparring with Elizabeth Taylor.
11. **Woman of the Year**
   A 1942 romantic comedy marking the first of nine films Hepburn made with Spencer Tracy, in which she plays a glamorous political columnist who falls for a sportswriter.
12. **Adam's Rib**
   A 1949 comedy in which Hepburn and Spencer Tracy are at their sparkling best as married lawyers on opposite sides of a sensational attempted-murder case, with sharp feminist themes.
13. **Summertime**
   A 1955 romance in which Hepburn plays a lonely Ohio spinster who travels to Venice and falls into a brief, bittersweet romance, earning an Oscar nomination.
14. **Pat and Mike**
   A 1952 comedy in which Hepburn draws on her genuine athleticism to play a champion sportswoman managed by a small-time promoter (Spencer Tracy).
15. **The Rainmaker**
   A 1956 Western drama in which Hepburn earned an Oscar nomination for her touching portrayal of a plain-spoken woman whose confidence is transformed by a charismatic con man (Burt Lancaster).
16. **Holiday**
   A 1938 romantic comedy in which Hepburn reunites with Cary Grant playing the unconventional, free-thinking sister who falls for her sister's idealistic suitor.

Tags: 20th-century, movies, actors, classics, katharine hepburn