Pretty Woman
by Gigi Anders
JANUARY 23, 2009 TAGS:
“People associate me with a time when movies were pleasant,” Audrey Hepburn once said, “when women wore pretty dresses in films and you heard beautiful music.”
Whenever Hepburn wore a pretty dress (and she was pretty in everything), whenever she spoke, you seemed to hear beautiful music. In her time, Hepburn epitomized women’s most feminine and dreamy aspirations: to be beautiful, cosmopolitan, slender, charming, gracious, funny, chic. Especially chic. Hepburn’s refined style, fine-tuned to iconic perfection in the ’50s and ’60s with her lifelong friend Hubert de Givenchy, is arguably the most enduringly influential from the movies since, well, ever.
Her two most fashion-y films, Funny Face (1957) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) — Sabrina (1954) was right up there, too — were re-released as deluxe DVD sets, part of Paramount’s Centennial Collection series, with lots of delicious extras and tidbits never seen before: profiles, short documentaries, and commentaries with producers, co-stars, cast and family members, designers and photographers. One feature’s called “It’s So Audrey: A Style Icon.” For hardcore Audrey-ophiles and those gals walking the red carpet this season, that sounds like a must.
Ironically, though her taste in clothes was impeccable and her figure sublime — 5’6 ½, 103 pounds — Hepburn was extremely self-critical. She saw her appearance as too tall, eyes too wide apart, teeth too crooked, chest too flat, nose too bumpy, nostrils too large and flaring, feet too big. But, as Tim Gunn would say, she made it work.
“You have to look at yourself objectively,” Hepburn said, “as if you were some kind of tool, and then decide exactly what you must do.”
Pamela Clarke Keogh, the author of Audrey Style, explained it this way to The New York Times: “[Hepburn] was modern enough and courageous enough and smart enough to figure what style worked best for her and her physique, and she had the discipline and style to stick with it.”
Indeed, clothes were a passion for Hepburn, who said, “I love them to the point where it is practically a vice.”
Ah, but a vice turned to virtue. For example, in 2006, Audrey’s Ultimate Little Black Dress, from the opening sequence of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, sold at auction at Christie’s London for $923,187, the highest price ever paid for a dress from a movie. Givenchy designed the sleek, minimalist, cut-out sleeveless gown of Italian satin. The proceeds went to City of Joy Aid, an Indian charity.
That was the thing about Hepburn, who died 16 years ago of cancer at only 63: She was different. Tinsel Town’s star-making machinery didn’t “create” her. Like Holly Golightly, the lonesome Manhattan sophisticate from Tulip, Texas, in Breakfast, Audrey Hepburn created herself, unlike so many of the manufactured glamour pusses of her era — Marilyn, Lana, Ava, Grace, Judy, Eva Marie, Natalie, Katharine, Ingrid, and Elizabeth. She was a very human, if otherworldly, Cinderella. She seemed close to us, almost attainable.
“Women can look like Audrey Hepburn,” she said, “by flipping out their hair, buying the large sunglasses and the little sleeveless dresses.”
Well, maybe her look was attainable. The same could be said, stylistically, of Jackie Onassis, another regal star who was also private. Except that unlike Jackie — and Marilyn and Natalie and Judy — Audrey wasn’t tragic. She may have had a certain fragility and vulnerability, and her death may have come too soon, but she wasn’t a victim. She considered herself lucky, and spent the last five years of her life helping real victims. As an international UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador who was paid $1 a year, Hepburn traveled the world in jeans and sneakers, working in the poorest parts of South America, Africa, and Asia.
“If I feel less helpless today,” she said, “it’s because I have now seen what can be done, and what is being done by UNICEF, and, most of all, by the people themselves.”
Hepburn understood firsthand the power of poverty and hunger as well as that of a sparkling tiara and a Little Black Dress.
Audrey Kathleen Hepburn-Ruston was born on May 4, 1929 in Brussels, Belgium, the only child of Joseph Victor Anthony Hepburn-Ruston, a wealthy, peripatetic British banker and insurance agent, and his second wife, Ella van Heemstra, a Dutch baroness. Joseph left the family in 1935 when Audrey was 6 (she called the abandonment the most traumatic event of her life), and for the next five years she attended a girls’ boarding school in Kent, England. Ella wanted her to learn English and excel at ballet, Audrey’s first professional passion. When England declared war on Germany in 1939, Audrey returned to Ella in neutral Holland. In 1940, Germany invaded. As circumstances worsened, the women lost everything and were reduced to eating nettles, tulip bulbs, cooked grass. Audrey, malnourished, was anemic, asthmatic and swollen from edema. When Holland was liberated in 1945, UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, UNICEF’s precursor, distributed food and supplies to thousands of Dutch children. The generosity deeply affected the young girl.
“We thought, ‘How could people be so rich and give away things that looked so new?’” she recalled. “I feel enormous respect for food, freedom, for good health and family, for human life.”
Mother and daughter moved to London, where Ella worked odd jobs while Audrey took dance classes and modeled informally for extra cash. Soon she won a small part in High Button Shoes. Then came another musical, Sauce Tartar, and another, Sauce Piquant.
“I worked like an idiot,” Audrey said. “It was work, work, work, work, work.”
Her stage roles led to bit parts in forgettable movies, yet she was luminous. “It is rather astonishing how she stands out in that seared desert of mediocrity,” the New York Times film critic wrote. “Miss Hepburn saves Monte Carlo Baby from being completely worthless.”
During filming, the French writer Colette, who was adapting her novel Gigi for Broadway, ran into Audrey in the Hotel de Paris and knew she’d found her lead. Walter Kerr of The Herald Tribune called Audrey’s performance “as fresh and frisky as a puppy out of a tub.” That led to her first major film role, the Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning turn as a runaway European princess in Roman Holiday (1953).
Audrey Hepburn was now a bona fide movie and Broadway star.
In Sabrina (1954), she played a chauffeur’s daughter among the Long Island rich, establishing a recurring (if preposterous) theme of Audrey as an ugly duckling turning into a beautiful swan. (Think Funny Face and 1964’s My Fair Lady.) That year, all of 25, she won the best actress Tony for the play Ondine, opposite Mel Ferrer. She married him that September in Switzerland, which became her home for the rest of her life. The couple also appeared together in War and Peace (1956). Their son, Sean, was born in 1960. The following year brought The Children’s Hour and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, proving Hepburn had both heart and mind as well as style. From a holy woman in The Nun’s Story (1959) to a school teacher accused of being a lesbian in The Children’s Hour to a hunted widow in Charade (1963) to a terrorized blind woman in Wait Until Dark (1967) to the legendary Maid Marian in Robin and Marian (1976), Hepburn was dramatic stardust.
But her marriage suffered. She and Ferrer divorced in 1968. In 1969 she married Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti — their son, Luca, was born in 1970 — and that union ended in 1979. In her later years, Hepburn lived with Robert Wolders, a Dutch actor and the widower of Merle Oberon. She called them “married, but not formally.”
It seems fitting that Hepburn’s last movie role, in Steven Spielberg’s Always (1989), was that of an angel. Our leading seraph may be gone forever, but her impact has never diminished. As Manolo Blahnik has said, “The imprint of Miss Hepburn is absolutely, totally present.”
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Whenever Hepburn wore a pretty dress (and she was pretty in everything), whenever she spoke, you seemed to hear beautiful music. In her time, Hepburn epitomized women’s most feminine and dreamy aspirations: to be beautiful, cosmopolitan, slender, charming, gracious, funny, chic. Especially chic. Hepburn’s refined style, fine-tuned to iconic perfection in the ’50s and ’60s with her lifelong friend Hubert de Givenchy, is arguably the most enduringly influential from the movies since, well, ever. Her two most fashion-y films, Funny Face (1957) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) — Sabrina (1954) was right up there, too — were re-released as deluxe DVD sets, part of Paramount’s Centennial Collection series, with lots of delicious extras and tidbits never seen before: profiles, short documentaries, and commentaries with producers, co-stars, cast and family members, designers and photographers. One feature’s called “It’s So Audrey: A Style Icon.” For hardcore Audrey-ophiles and those gals walking the red carpet this season, that sounds like a must.
Ironically, though her taste in clothes was impeccable and her figure sublime — 5’6 ½, 103 pounds — Hepburn was extremely self-critical. She saw her appearance as too tall, eyes too wide apart, teeth too crooked, chest too flat, nose too bumpy, nostrils too large and flaring, feet too big. But, as Tim Gunn would say, she made it work.
“You have to look at yourself objectively,” Hepburn said, “as if you were some kind of tool, and then decide exactly what you must do.”
Pamela Clarke Keogh, the author of Audrey Style, explained it this way to The New York Times: “[Hepburn] was modern enough and courageous enough and smart enough to figure what style worked best for her and her physique, and she had the discipline and style to stick with it.”
Indeed, clothes were a passion for Hepburn, who said, “I love them to the point where it is practically a vice.”
Ah, but a vice turned to virtue. For example, in 2006, Audrey’s Ultimate Little Black Dress, from the opening sequence of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, sold at auction at Christie’s London for $923,187, the highest price ever paid for a dress from a movie. Givenchy designed the sleek, minimalist, cut-out sleeveless gown of Italian satin. The proceeds went to City of Joy Aid, an Indian charity.
That was the thing about Hepburn, who died 16 years ago of cancer at only 63: She was different. Tinsel Town’s star-making machinery didn’t “create” her. Like Holly Golightly, the lonesome Manhattan sophisticate from Tulip, Texas, in Breakfast, Audrey Hepburn created herself, unlike so many of the manufactured glamour pusses of her era — Marilyn, Lana, Ava, Grace, Judy, Eva Marie, Natalie, Katharine, Ingrid, and Elizabeth. She was a very human, if otherworldly, Cinderella. She seemed close to us, almost attainable. “Women can look like Audrey Hepburn,” she said, “by flipping out their hair, buying the large sunglasses and the little sleeveless dresses.”
Well, maybe her look was attainable. The same could be said, stylistically, of Jackie Onassis, another regal star who was also private. Except that unlike Jackie — and Marilyn and Natalie and Judy — Audrey wasn’t tragic. She may have had a certain fragility and vulnerability, and her death may have come too soon, but she wasn’t a victim. She considered herself lucky, and spent the last five years of her life helping real victims. As an international UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador who was paid $1 a year, Hepburn traveled the world in jeans and sneakers, working in the poorest parts of South America, Africa, and Asia.
“If I feel less helpless today,” she said, “it’s because I have now seen what can be done, and what is being done by UNICEF, and, most of all, by the people themselves.”
Hepburn understood firsthand the power of poverty and hunger as well as that of a sparkling tiara and a Little Black Dress.
Audrey Kathleen Hepburn-Ruston was born on May 4, 1929 in Brussels, Belgium, the only child of Joseph Victor Anthony Hepburn-Ruston, a wealthy, peripatetic British banker and insurance agent, and his second wife, Ella van Heemstra, a Dutch baroness. Joseph left the family in 1935 when Audrey was 6 (she called the abandonment the most traumatic event of her life), and for the next five years she attended a girls’ boarding school in Kent, England. Ella wanted her to learn English and excel at ballet, Audrey’s first professional passion. When England declared war on Germany in 1939, Audrey returned to Ella in neutral Holland. In 1940, Germany invaded. As circumstances worsened, the women lost everything and were reduced to eating nettles, tulip bulbs, cooked grass. Audrey, malnourished, was anemic, asthmatic and swollen from edema. When Holland was liberated in 1945, UNRRA, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, UNICEF’s precursor, distributed food and supplies to thousands of Dutch children. The generosity deeply affected the young girl.
“We thought, ‘How could people be so rich and give away things that looked so new?’” she recalled. “I feel enormous respect for food, freedom, for good health and family, for human life.”Mother and daughter moved to London, where Ella worked odd jobs while Audrey took dance classes and modeled informally for extra cash. Soon she won a small part in High Button Shoes. Then came another musical, Sauce Tartar, and another, Sauce Piquant.
“I worked like an idiot,” Audrey said. “It was work, work, work, work, work.”
Her stage roles led to bit parts in forgettable movies, yet she was luminous. “It is rather astonishing how she stands out in that seared desert of mediocrity,” the New York Times film critic wrote. “Miss Hepburn saves Monte Carlo Baby from being completely worthless.”
During filming, the French writer Colette, who was adapting her novel Gigi for Broadway, ran into Audrey in the Hotel de Paris and knew she’d found her lead. Walter Kerr of The Herald Tribune called Audrey’s performance “as fresh and frisky as a puppy out of a tub.” That led to her first major film role, the Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning turn as a runaway European princess in Roman Holiday (1953).
Audrey Hepburn was now a bona fide movie and Broadway star.
In Sabrina (1954), she played a chauffeur’s daughter among the Long Island rich, establishing a recurring (if preposterous) theme of Audrey as an ugly duckling turning into a beautiful swan. (Think Funny Face and 1964’s My Fair Lady.) That year, all of 25, she won the best actress Tony for the play Ondine, opposite Mel Ferrer. She married him that September in Switzerland, which became her home for the rest of her life. The couple also appeared together in War and Peace (1956). Their son, Sean, was born in 1960. The following year brought The Children’s Hour and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, proving Hepburn had both heart and mind as well as style. From a holy woman in The Nun’s Story (1959) to a school teacher accused of being a lesbian in The Children’s Hour to a hunted widow in Charade (1963) to a terrorized blind woman in Wait Until Dark (1967) to the legendary Maid Marian in Robin and Marian (1976), Hepburn was dramatic stardust.
But her marriage suffered. She and Ferrer divorced in 1968. In 1969 she married Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti — their son, Luca, was born in 1970 — and that union ended in 1979. In her later years, Hepburn lived with Robert Wolders, a Dutch actor and the widower of Merle Oberon. She called them “married, but not formally.”
It seems fitting that Hepburn’s last movie role, in Steven Spielberg’s Always (1989), was that of an angel. Our leading seraph may be gone forever, but her impact has never diminished. As Manolo Blahnik has said, “The imprint of Miss Hepburn is absolutely, totally present.”
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