Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 21, 1993 TAG: 9301210277
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARTHA SHERRILL THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
HEPBURN'S LIFE, WORK RADIATED GRACE, SPIRIT
She had a calmness and spiritedness and gentility that many people would come to explain as breeding, but it seemed way beyond that. Audrey Hepburn made you want to stand straighter, talk with a slight English accent, lose weight, wear sunglasses and huge hats, buy little black dresses, and then maybe move to Manhattan and throw crowded cocktail parties that lasted all night until you decided to take a Checker cab down Fifth Avenue to watch the sun come up in front of Tiffany's.Audrey Hepburn had enchantment to her, and an effortless grace. In every role, not just as Holly Golightly in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," she transcended gloom and everydayness with a rare combination of fragility and abandon and ancient European wisdom. She had allure, but it was unlike anybody else's. If you rent "Charade," a picture she made in 1963 with Cary Grant, you'll notice she matches him, line by line, in elegance and relaxed charm. They are just friends, but in one scene she stands a little too close, puts her finger inside the cleft in his chin and asks, "How do you shave in there?"
She began appearing on American movie screens in 1953, and nothing seemed the same for women again. She was scrawny and bony. Her nose was a little lumpy, her eyebrows were too dark, and her chest? It looked like a boy's. But she was something, wasn't she? She walked like a dancer, had trained as a dancer, and in all those full and swirling skirts she had a waist that nobody - not even Scarlett O'Hara - came close to.
"I was just sort of launched on this career," she said in 1985, during a trip to Washington. "I went from one picture to the other, really, trying to sort of catch up with myself. I was totally unaware of the great significance of doing my first movie."
Looking back now, it seems she was always playing in some rags-to-riches or riches-to-rags story that pivoted about her natural aristocratic bearing. In "Roman Holiday" she was a princess who slums as a commoner and falls in love with a newspaperman - which is only made remotely believable because he's played by Gregory Peck. In "Sabrina" she played the chauffeur's gangly daughter who goes off to Paris for a couple years and comes back transformed - Voila! - into a woman just like Audrey Hepburn, and suddenly heirs Humphrey Bogart and William Holden are both in love with her. She was the perfect Eliza Doolittle, even though Marnie Nixon did her singing.
She was a brat too, a free spirit, an early beatnik sort of creature, but a creature. Exotic and liberated and loony and Bohemian. Her romantic leads always seemed to be old men - but she made you not notice their hairpieces or the glue that held them. She brought cool air and life into every room, onto every screen, and into all the old guys. There was Bogart in "Sabrina," when she was 25 and he was 54. There was Fred Astaire in "Funny Face," dancing on the street in front of her Paris window - she was 28 and he was 58. In "Love in the Afternoon," she was 28 and Gary Cooper was 56.
In the past 15 years, although she did make a few movies, she was visible mostly in her work for children. We'd see a photograph of her on a UNICEF tour - because she was its "goodwill ambassador" for years - in some dry setting in Africa perhaps, holding a child and smiling, her chin always up, her lips parted to reveal her wonderfully crooked teeth, her face, well, completely undiminished. She seemed to live as gracefully as her body moved. Even when she was surrounded by people, she was a miracle of solitude and some kind of spiritual refinement. She seemed above face lifts and chemical peels, and anything else that would make her seem to be desperate for something. She had known - always known - that life was not about movies or fame or Givenchy.
This gamin-turned-legend transcended fad and the phoniness of her profession, and the seediness. She never seemed to be trying, or wanting. She existed - and what you saw on the screen always seemed to be only Audrey Hepburn, simply existing, but you know? That was enough.