CBC News Indepth: D-Day 1944 Front Page

Katharine Hepburn (AP Photo, File)

At His Majesty's Theatre in Montreal in the fouth Victory Star Show on CBC Radio, broadcast May 3, 1944 Katharine Hepburn describes the naval career of Leading Seaman Wilfred Greenwood, 22, of Goderich, Ontario. After joining the Royal Canadian Navy in June 1940, Greenwood served with a gun crews on a "Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship." His ships were torpedoed three times, killing 35 people.

Listen to Katharine Hepburn at His Majesty's Theatre, May 3, 1944. [Real Audio Runs 4:33]

There has been a deal of boasting lately about the new high-powered methods of language teaching which give a working knowledge of a foreign tongue in a few months.

But Katharine Hepburn, the stage and screen actress and NBC star, recently broke what may be the world's record by giving a radio performance that utterly charmed French-speaking Canadians when only two weeks previously she had never any more than babbled a few words of French.

When the actress generously offered to come to Canada for the Sixth Victory Loan, she found more on her hands than she thought she had bargained for. Two weeks before her Montreal appearance she received two CBC radio scripts-one in English and one in French. Her confusion was great, to say the least, when she realized she was booked to appear on the French Network, as well as on the English.

French had been on the course for the Bryn Mawr graduate but she had practically never spoken a word of it. Confused, yes, but abashed never! She placed her predicament before a French professor, and they both went to work.

In her gracious manner, Miss Hepburn said nothing in Montreal about the gruelling hours of intensive work that must have preceded her departure from Hollywood, but French network listeners were completely captivated by her beautiful pronunciation of their language.

–Courtesy CBC Program Schedule June 1944

^TOP

Audio: Flying with the Canadians in the RAF!