Woman of The Year - Background and Production

Background and Production

The outline for the film was developed by Garson Kanin, a close friend of Hepburn. Hepburn then passed the outline on to Joseph L. Mankiewicz at MGM, and said the price was $250,000 - half for her, half for the script. He liked it and agreed to produce the movie. Kanin was fighting in the war at the time, so the script was written by his brother, Michael Kanin, and mutual friend Ring Lardner, Jr. Hepburn contributed significantly to the script - reading it, suggesting cuts and word changes, and generally providing helpful enthusiasm for the project. As a part of the deal, Hepburn was allowed to select her co-star and director (Tracy and Stevens).

Woman of the Year was the first of nine films Hepburn and Tracy made together. They met for the first time on the shoot. In the 1993 documentary Katharine Hepburn: All About Me, Hepburn herself says she was wearing high heels at the first meeting with Tracy and producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and said "I'm afraid I'm a bit tall for you, Mr. Tracy". Mankiewicz then responded, "Don't worry, Kate, he'll cut you down to size." It was during the filming of Woman of the Year that Hepburn and Tracy became romantically involved - a relationship that lasted until Tracy's death in 1967.

The film was originally shot with a different ending, but it proved unpopular at test screenings. The decision was made to change it, and the final fifteen minutes of the film were re-written and shot. The original ending of the film saw Sam go missing (after he had left the child at the orphanage) while he was meant to be writing an article about an upcoming boxing match. Tess decides to take over for him, and visits the gym to learn about the fight. Sam is found in a language school trying to learn French and Spanish, to "be important", and is shocked when he sees the article. He goes to the fight where he meets Tess. She insists that she did it to be a good wife, and says she will change and do all the things she is supposed to do. He says that he doesn't want either extreme, he just wants her to be "Tess Harding Craig" (like in the released ending.)

Ring Lardner Jr describes in Archive of America Television oral history interviews (2000) that changes made to the ending of the film were against the wishes of Katherine Hepburn, whilst both screenwriters were on vacation in New York. These changes were made by Louis B Mayer, producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz and director George Stevens. "She had to get her comeuppance for being too strong in a man's world so they wrote a scene where she tried to fix breakfast... and gets everything wrong", said Lardner. The screenwriters were given some room to rewrite the new ending on return from New York, and in the same interview Lardner recalls "some of the worst lines we rewrote, but we couldn't fix it, we couldn't change it fundamentally"