The actors Audrey Hepburn said could do everything she couldn’t: “A phenomenon”
The first time I saw Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, I truly believed that she could do everything. And that’s also exactly what my grandfather came away with when he skipped school and saw it in the theatre.
In an era when Hollywood was looking to capitalise on formulae that worked and stars that could neatly fit into marketable boxes, Hepburn simply leapt over those restrictive categories and off the screen. Even when you go over her extensively analysed filmography, it’s almost impossible to perfectly describe what she managed to achieve, only because her crystallised image in film history is so deceptively complex.
Hepburn broke records for her deft and intricately crafted portrayal of a princess trying to break out of her suffocating prison of conventions, winning almost every major accolade along the way – including an Oscar and a Golden Globe, among others. She was also New York-personified in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which is now-maligned and rightly so for Mickey Rooney’s horrifically racist role, but audiences still come back to it just for Hepburn’s magic.
Even in one of Billy Wilder’s weaker films, Sabrina, it’s Hepburn who becomes a focal point and manages to hold her own alongside the star power of the likes of Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. Interestingly, though, Hepburn herself was convinced that there were younger actors who were more accomplished than her and could reach places she had never ventured into.
In Barry Paris’ biography of the actor, the writer reported that Hepburn had once told a journalist about her taste in films in her later years. Paris wrote, “She loved Gerard Depardieu’s Cyrano ‘because they kept it intimate’, and Spielberg’s ET, and ‘anything with Michelle Pfeiffer in it. I like to watch them in my bed —that’s the best place! I just saw Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons in The Mission and thought that was a lovely film. And I very much liked Prizzi’s Honor.‘”
Hepburn was also asked to cite the names of contemporary female actors whose work she admired, and she didn’t hesitate to praise the movies of Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep and Cher, in addition to Pfeiffer, of whom she was a huge fan. While discussing their impact on the screen, these artists, who probably considered Hepburn’s artistry a formative influence, pointed out how different the younger generation was in terms of their skill sets.
Singling out Cher and Streep as standout stars at the top of the industry, Hepburn elaborated: “Cher has an enormous scale of emotions and total lack of inhibition, which I haven’t… Meryl Streep is a phenomenon. She can make herself look any way she wants and become so many different people. She can do anything she wants. I can’t.”
Of course, it’s hard to disagree with Hepburn’s opinion here, but she also managed to tap into some of those attributes in one of the best films she ever made: Stanley Donen’s Charade. Starring alongside Cary Grant, Hepburn’s character is intentionally designed to be mysteriously opaque yet transparent, and she handles that dichotomy with unmatched grace, delivering a performance that very few in the history of cinema could have pulled off.
