Beautiful Photos of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant From ‘Bringing Up Baby’ (1938)

Bringing Up Baby is a 1938 American screwball comedy film directed by Howard Hawks, and starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. It was released by RKO Radio Pictures. The film tells the story of a paleontologist in a number of predicaments involving a scatterbrained heiress and a leopard named Baby. The screenplay was adapted by Dudley Nichols and Hagar Wilde from a short story by Wilde which originally appeared in Collier’s Weekly magazine on April 10, 1937.

Bringing Up Baby was a box-office bomb upon its release, although it eventually made a small profit after its re-release in the early 1940s. Shortly after the film’s premiere, Hepburn was one of a group of actors labeled as “box office poison” by the Independent Theatre Owners of America. Her career waned until The Philadelphia Story two years later. The film’s reputation began to grow during the 1950s when it was shown on television.

In 1990, Bringing Up Baby was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant,” and it has appeared on a number of greatest-films lists, ranking 88th on the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest American films of all time list.

Take a look at these beautiful portraits of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, captured during the making of Bringing Up Baby in 1938.