She took to writing; her first book, The Making of `The African Queen': Or, How I Went To Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind made her a best-selling author at 77. She followed it up with Me: Stories of My Life in 1991.
In 1994, Warren Beatty persuaded a reluctant Hepburn to fly out to Los Angeles and play his aunt in the romantic comedy Love Affair. She also appeared in a television movie, One Christmas.
Among the honors coming her way in later years: In 1999, a survey of screen legends by the American Film Institute ranked her No. 1 among actresses.
She was born in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 12, 1907, one of six children of Thomas N. Hepburn, a noted urologist and pioneer in social hygiene, and Katharine Houghton Hepburn, who worked for birth control and getting the vote for women. Hepburn is survived by a sister, Margaret Hepburn Perry; a brother, Robert Hepburn; and 13 nieces and nephews.
"My parents were much more fascinating, as people, than I am," the actress once said. "Mother was really left of center; women's suffrage was her great cause, and I remember appearing at all the local fairs carrying huge flocks of balloons that said `Votes for Women.' I almost went up with them."
Young Kate was educated by tutors and at private schools, entering Bryn Mawr in 1924. After graduating, she joined a stock company in Baltimore.
She made her New York debut in These Days in 1928, the same year she married Philadelphia socialite Ludlow Ogden Smith. She divorced him in 1934 and later remarked, "I don't believe in marriage. It's bloody impractical to love, honor and obey. If it weren't, you wouldn't have to sign a contract."
But she also lauded "Luddy" for opening doors in New York for a raw young actress. She berated herself as behaving like :"a pig" toward him.
"At the beginning I had money; I wasn't a poor little thing. I don't know what I would have done if I'd had to come to New York and get a job as a waiter or something like that.
``I think I'm a success, but I had every advantage -- I should have been," she said.
She had various health problems in later years, including hip replacement surgery and tremors similar to Parkinson's disease.
In a 1990 interview, she told The Associated Press: "I'm what is known as gradually disintegrating. I don't fear the next world, or anything. I don't fear hell, and I don't look forward to heaven."
"There comes a time in your life when people get very sweet to you," she said in another interview. "I don't mind people being sweet to me. In fact, I'm getting rather sweet back at them.
"But I'm a madly irritating person, and I irritated them for years. Anything definite is irritating -- and stimulating. I think they're beginning to think I'm not going to be around much longer. And what do you know -- they'll miss me, like an old monument."
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