The movie that almost killed Audrey Hepburn: “Everything went to hell”
Audrey Hepburn was known for playing characters that exuded grace, style, and sophistication, so action moves were not really part of her repertoire. That’s not to say that she couldn’t have pulled it off. She might have been the perfect fit for a stylish thriller that involved high-speed car chases and shootouts. But the one time she made a movie that involved challenging location shooting and stuntwork, things went horribly wrong for everyone involved, and ended in tragedy.
In 1960, a year before she played Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Hepburn starred in The Unforgiven, a western about a prosperous ranching family that is persecuted by its neighbours when they discover that their adopted daughter (Hepburn) might have come from the reviled Kiowa tribe in the area. It was an outlier of its era in its portrayal of racism against Native Americans, but any of its merits were sharply undercut by the harrowing production.
The film was directed by John Huston, a filmmaker who was both admired and notorious for shooting his movies in remote, often inhospitable conditions. In this case, he chose Durango, Mexico, which was tame by his standards. More than a hundred films were shot in the state in the 1950s and ‘60s, including several John Wayne movies. There was nothing particularly challenging about it, especially considering that he had already shot parts of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre there years before. Things went terribly awry from the beginning, though.
In his memoir, Huston blamed the troubles on some form of divine punishment. Early in the production, the producers made it clear that they wanted a conventional action movie rather than a cutting-edge deconstruction of westerns, and against his instincts, Huston decided to stay. “From that moment on, the entire picture turned sour,” he wrote. “Everything went to hell. It was as if some celestial vengeance had been loosed upon me for infidelity to my principles.”
The first crisis occurred during rehearsal when Hepburn was thrown from the back of a horse. She broke several vertebrae, putting the production on hold for nearly two months while she recuperated. More significantly, she had been pregnant at the time of the accident and miscarried shortly thereafter. Elsewhere during filming, Audie Murphy, who played Hepburn’s older brother in the movie, had to be rescued by a stills photographer when his boat capsized on a lake, nearly killing him. In the biggest tragedy of the whole production, three crewmembers died when the plane carrying them from the US to Durango crashed.
Some of the troubles were of Huston’s own making. A local artist claimed that she had an affair with him, which resulted in pregnancy during the production. If so, that might have been the reason for reports that his mistress and personal assistant, Lorrie Sherwood, attacked him with a knife.
The film itself proved to be just as underwhelming and disjointed as Huston had feared when he lost control to the producers, but even if it had been a masterpiece, it likely would have been overshadowed by the behind-the-scenes tragedies. Hepburn finished the film in a back brace, but despite the ordeal, was back to work on Breakfast at Tiffany’s that same year. Not surprisingly, The Unforgiven was her first and last western.
