The African Queen (1951)
John Huston's 1951 WWI East Africa adventure. Bogart and Hepburn down a river to torpedo a German gunboat.
Actor: Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Hepburn won Best Actress four times, more than any performer, across a career spanning six decades, and never attended the ceremony to collect any of them.
She was labelled box office poison in 1938 and responded by buying out her own contract and engineering The Philadelphia Story as a comeback vehicle, which she controlled the rights to. It worked completely.
She made nine films with Spencer Tracy, wore trousers when that was genuinely scandalous, and played women who argue as equals in a period that rarely wrote them. The African Queen, Bringing Up Baby and The Lion in Winter are the essential ones.
