Katharine Hepburn in the context of "The Philadelphia Story (play)"

Philip Jerome Quinn Barry (June 18, 1896 – December 3, 1949) was an American dramatist best known for his plays Holiday (1928) and The Philadelphia Story (1939), which were both made into films starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

The Academy Award for Best Actress is an award presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It has been awarded since the 1st Academy Awards to an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance in a leading role in a film released that year. The award is traditionally presented by the previous year's Best Actor winner. However, in recent years, it has shifted towards being presented by previous years' Best Actress winners instead.

The Best Actress award has been presented 97 times, to 80 different actresses. The first winner was Janet Gaynor for her roles in 7th Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928), and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), and the most recent winner is Mikey Madison for her role in Anora (2024). The record for most wins is four, held by Katharine Hepburn; Frances McDormand has won three times, and thirteen other actresses have won the award twice. Meryl Streep has received the most nominations in the category—seventeen—and has won twice. At the 41st Academy Awards in 1969, Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn received the same number of votes and so shared the award, the only time this has occurred.

The Volpi Cup for Best Actress is an award presented by the Venice Film Festival. It is given by the festival jury in honor of an actress who has delivered an outstanding performance from the films in the competition slate. It is named in honor of Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, the founder of the festival. The first ceremony was held in 1932, when Helen Hayes received the Volpi Cup for the title role in The Sin of Madelon Claudet (1931)—this was the only time that the award was chosen by public voting. From 1942 to 1945, the festival was suspended because of World War II. The student protests in May 1968 opened a period of institutional changes, with no prizes were awarded from 1969 to 1979.

The official name of the award has changed several times. In 1934, Katharine Hepburn was honored with the Great Gold Medal of the National Fascist Association for Entertainment for the Best Actress for her role in Little Women. It was renamed the Volpi Cup for Best Actress the following year. The awards given from 1947 to 1949 were named the International Award for the Best Actress.

The Aviator is a 2004 epic biographical drama film directed by Martin Scorsese and written by John Logan. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, and Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner. The supporting cast features Ian Holm, John C. Reilly, Alec Baldwin, Jude Law, Gwen Stefani, Kelli Garner, Matt Ross, Willem Dafoe, Alan Alda, and Edward Herrmann.

Based on the 1993 non-fiction book Howard Hughes: The Secret Life by Charles Higham, the film depicts the life of Howard Hughes, an aviation pioneer and director of the film Hell's Angels. The film portrays his life from 1927 to 1947 during which time Hughes became a successful film producer and an aviation magnate while simultaneously growing more unstable due to severe obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD).

RKO Pictures, commonly known as simply RKO, is an American film, television and stage production company owned by Concord. In its original incarnation, as RKO Radio Pictures, Inc., it was one of the "Big Five" film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age. The business was formed after the Keith-Albee-Orpheum theater chain and Joseph P. Kennedy's Film Booking Offices of America studio were brought together under the control of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) in October 1928. RCA executive David Sarnoff engineered the merger to create a market for the company's sound-on-film technology, RCA Photophone, and in early 1929 production began under the RKO name (an initialism of Radio-Keith-Orpheum). Two years later, another Kennedy concern, the Pathé studio, was folded into the operation. By the mid-1940s, RKO was controlled by investor Floyd Odlum.

RKO has long been renowned for its cycle of musicals starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the mid- to late 1930s. Actors Katharine Hepburn and, later, Robert Mitchum had their first major successes at the studio. Cary Grant was a mainstay for years, with credits including touchstones of the screwball comedy genre with which RKO was identified. The work of producer Val Lewton's low-budget horror unit and RKO's many ventures into the field now known as film noir have been acclaimed, largely after the fact, by film critics and historians. The studio produced two of the most famous films in motion picture history: King Kong and producer/director/star Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. RKO was also responsible for notable coproductions such as It's a Wonderful Life and Notorious, and it distributed many celebrated films by animation pioneer Walt Disney and leading independent producer Samuel Goldwyn. Though it often could not compete financially for top star and director contracts, RKO's below-the-line personnel were among the finest, including composer Max Steiner, cinematographers Nicholas Musuraca and Gregg Toland, and designer Van Nest Polglase.