Katharine Hepburn & Spencer Tracy

The Mezzanine at BFI Southbank hosts changing displays curated from BFI Collections to complement seasons taking place in the cinemas.

To accompany the Katharine Hepburn & Spencer Tracy Season at BFI Southbank in February, this display celebrates one of Hollywood’s most popular and enduring couples, using production and publicity materials from the BFI’s rich collections to explore what made their partnership so compelling, both on and off the screen.

The Hepburn and Tracy films represent one of the most beguiling conventions of the romantic comedy: the attraction of opposites. The apparently incongruous pairing of the upper-class, WASP-ish Katharine Hepburn with the down-to-earth Spencer Tracy in fact provided the perfect raw material for the smart and sexy sparring of films such as Woman of the Year (1942) and Adam’s Rib (1949). The couple worked with a number of Hollywood’s most outstanding directors including George Cukor, Frank Capra and Elia Kazan.

Their on-screen chemistry was of course carried over into real life and despite the Catholic Tracy’s reluctance to divorce his estranged wife, he and Hepburn shared a romance that spanned more than a quarter of a century, until his death in 1967. He was never to see the release of their final on-screen pairing in Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), a performance which was rewarded with an Academy Award for Hepburn and a posthumous nomination for Tracy himself.

With thanks to the Cinema Museum, London