The breakthrough role Audrey Hepburn was fired from twice: “It was too late to replace her”
Audrey Hepburn’s Hollywood story is often told through the lens of a fairytale breakthrough. When she glided onto the screen in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday in 1953, she looked like a perfectly formed movie star, as if she’d been waiting her whole life for that inevitable moment. However, as is usually the case, the story behind the scenes was much more fraught, circuitous, and even lucky.
It took Hepburn a while to get to Hollywood. She spent her early years in the entertainment industry honing her skills as a ballerina in London before being told that she was too tall to succeed in the long term. When she turned to theatre and movies, directors and casting agents didn’t experience the proverbial bolt of lightning when she walked into the room. They cast her in small roles in English films and didn’t seem to think that she was destined to become the generation-spanning icon that she became.
She spent a few years piecing together a career until she landed a breakthrough opportunity in the Broadway play Gigi. Based on the novel by the French writer Collette, the story follows a young Parisian woman who is brought up to become a high-society escort. Hepburn’s roles on stage up to that point had been so small that she had never learned to speak into the vast expanse of a theatre, and she had to take lessons to pass muster.
That was the least of her problems, though. There was a danger to being ‘discovered’ overnight and launched into an arena unlike any she’d experienced. From the first day of rehearsals, Hepburn’s inexperience worried producers Gilbert Miller and Morton Gottlieb. In fact, they quickly realised that they’d made a terrible mistake in hiring her. Her co-star Cathleen Nesbitt recalled, “She didn’t have much idea of phrasing. She had no idea how to project, and she would come bounding onto the stage like a gazelle.”
Instead of working with the young star and making sure she had all the support she needed to succeed, Miller fired her after a mere five days. Soon, however, he discovered that replacing her wasn’t as easy as snapping his fingers and conjuring theatre’s next greatest talent. It was, as Gottlieb recalled, “too late to replace her,” so a few days later, Miller hired her again. A few days after that, he changed his mind again and fired her, only to come to his previous conclusion and rehire her.
Not surprisingly, Hepburn wasn’t loving this back-and-forth. After years of taking work where she could get it to make ends meet, this level of uncertainty over what should have been the most exciting and promising moment of her career was making the experience a nightmare. On top of the intermittent firing and rehiring, Gottlieb was taking his own approach, which involved working Hepburn for 18 hours a day, usually in secret, to avoid having to pay the rest of the cast and crew for overtime.
The fact that Hepburn was able to make it to opening night was an achievement in itself, but when the reviews started coming in, it was even more impressive. Critics instantly picked up on her otherworldly charisma and star power. They didn’t love the play, but they adored Audrey. The whole ordeal must have been pretty unhappy for the young actor, but all that pressure and scepticism surrounding her abilities probably came in handy the following year when she was offered the starring role in her first Hollywood production, Roman Holiday. The rest, as they say, is history.
