HEPBURN ANGEL WITH A BACKBONE OF STEEL
Sixty years after ‘Roman Holiday’ made Audrey Hepburn a star, Anne Billson says her twee reputation is undeserved
WHAT do we know about Audrey Hepburn? That she was super-skinny, with enormous eyes and a dazzling smile. That towards the end of her life she worked tirelessly as special ambassador for Unicef. That she’s a style icon, so full of grace, elegance and charm that her image is still being used to sell jeans, cars and chocolate. She played ageless, sexless gamines and ingénues; she also played a water sprite and (in Green Mansions, directed by her then husband, Mel Ferrer) Rima the Bird Girl in a pixie tunic in the jungle, and (in Steven Spielberg’s Always) an angel in a field of corn.
Roman Holiday, released on September 2 1953, was her first leading film role, and she won an Oscar for it, as though everyone realised her star persona was already fully formed. Yet, at 24, Audrey Hepburn was already the sum of the several lives: as the Belgian-born daughter of a penniless Dutch baroness and a British wastrel, ballet student, survivor of occupied Arnhem, heroine of the Resistance (she delivered a message to a British parachutist under cover of picking wild flowers), model, chorus girl. Roman Holiday might have seemed like overnight success, but she had already lived through more than your average ingénue.
It wasn’t even her first big break — she had been talent-spotted in the lobby of Monte Carlo’s Hotel de Paris by the French author Colette, who reportedly declared, “Voilà! There is my Gigi!” Hepburn went on to star in Anita Loos’s adaptation of Colette’s novel on Broadway.
With her looks, she stood out from the crowd. So when Paramount was searching for their Princess Ann, the studio’s London production chief remembered her in a tiny role as a cigarette girl in Laughter in Paradise. Director William Wyler said: “She had everything I was looking for — charm, innocence and talent. She also was very funny. She was absolutely enchanting.”
Roman Holiday was the first Hollywood movie to be shot entirely on location in Italy. Hepburn plays Cinderella in reverse — a princess who goes awol to spend the day as a commoner in Rome, riding a scooter, falling in love with journalist Gregory Peck. The 13-year age gap was not excessive, yet prefigured a pattern in which she would be paired with actors old enough to be her father — Humphrey Bogart (29 years her senior) in Sabrina, Fred Astaire (29) in Funny Face, Gary Cooper (27) in Love in the Afternoon, Cary Grant (25) in Charade , and Rex Harrison (21) in My Fair Lady.
The age differences now seem chaste rather than creepy thanks to the absence of anything resembling sex appeal. Superficially, of course, this could be due to her boyish figure; Billy Wilder called her “the girl most likely to make bosoms a thing of the past” while Photoplay magazine proclaimed her “flat-chested, slim-hipped and altogether un-Marilyn Monroeish.” But it’s not just the androgynous form — it’s also the absence of sensuality, duplicity or mystery. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she strips Holly Golightly of all Lula Mae Barnes’s sexuality and turns her into a chic Manhattan clothes horse. Truman Capote wanted Monroe for the role, but, he claimed, “Paramount double-crossed me in every way and cast Audrey. She was just wrong for that part.”
But Hepburn established a new standard of beauty and her look was widely copied. In the ’50s her popularity was liberating in that it presented an alternative to voluptuous sex symbols such as Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor, with an image that appealed more to young women than to men. But that angular physique has exercised its own sort of tyranny over generations of females who now believe the acme of chic is having the stick insect body and personality of an eternally pubescent girl.
After the father figures, it’s refreshing to see her, from the late ’60s onwards, having fun with co-stars around her own age — giggling in a cupboard with Peter O’Toole (in How to Steal a Million), frolicking with Albert Finney (in Two for the Road), bickering with Sean Connery (in Robin and Marian). Who knows? If she hadn’t opted for early retirement, or if ’70s Hollywood had provided meatier roles for actresses, we might have seen her ripen and change.
Received wisdom has it that Hepburn was not so great an actress. But this seems to be on the evidence of her “serious” performances in The Unforgiven, The Nun’s Story or The Children’s Hour, in which she’s rarely convincing and frequently dull.
If, on the other hand, you take into consideration Roman Holiday, Funny Face and Charade , she nails it. This is the great acting. Hepburn was always a hard worker, but she makes it look effortless, as though she’s playing herself — the hardest thing of all. Everyone loves Audrey, except JD Salinger, and Emma Thompson, who finds her “fantastically twee”. But I don’t think Hepburn was twee. She drank scotch and smoked heavily and could be ribald, and her work ethic sounds like that of someone with a backbone of steel. It takes a lot of effort to be universally loved. She sounds like a trouper.