Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 29, 1993 TAG: 9301290424
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
INNER PURITY
THE SCREEN appeal of Audrey Hepburn was always more difficult to define than to accept.She was beautiful, but far from the buxom sexual temptress who has been the standard Hollywood bimbo star. She was a competent actress, but her range was narrow. She moved well, but she boasted little of the animal grace most major female stars projected as naturally as breathing.
Yet when Hepburn died last week at 63 of cancer, her career was praised and her death mourned as universally, and as sincerely, as any of the great screen stars.
Though her faintly accented English was perfect, she was of Dutch-Irish extraction and grew up in the Netherlands, where, in her early teens, she experienced the hardships and deprivations of an occupied nation and was said afterward to have performed heroic duties for the resistance. But it was when she moved to England after the war that her career began.
She was trained as a ballerina and made a few British and French movies, where she caught the eye of the great French novelist Colette. But her international career began when she came to America to star as the incognito European princess in "Roman Holiday."
She caught on at once, won an Oscar for that role and moved without further buildup into the glossy starring roles that made her famous: as the bewitching "Sabrina," in "Love in the Afternoon," in "The Nun's Story," for which she won a second Oscar, unforgettably in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."
She epitomized for many the "mannequin look" so characteristic of the 1950s. Critic David Thomson believes her later pictures may have been less successful than her first because that image of willowy high fashion had lost favor.
Another guess, however, is that the sensationally expressive beauty of her face led directors to shoot her in close-ups more typical of silent films than talkies.
It was difficult, in any case, to categorize her appeal. And though the novelty of her first movies may have faded, she remained personally popular throughout - untouched by scandal, always immaculately mannered and dressed, one of the few genuine ladies in a medium dominated by dames. She shone opposite every kind of leading man - Gregory Peck, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, William Holden, Henry Fonda, Burt Lancaster, Peter O'Toole, Rex Harrison, Albert Finney - and yielded not a centimeter to any.
What was it she had? For me, it was an almost transcendent radiance that suggested an inner purity so fine and so rare, no merely mortal complexity could touch it.
Many who loved her thought her at her best in "Roman Holiday" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's," and she was certainly fine in both. But I remember her best as an almost ideal Natasha in King Vidor's otherwise lackluster "War and Peace," the perfect projection of Tolstoy's great heroine; and as Eliza Doolittle in George Cukor's "My Fair Lady," in which - though her own singing voice was so thin her songs had to be dubbed, famously, by Marni Nixon - her radiance was allowed to grow before the audience's eyes.
After a decade at the very pinnacle of stardom, her "bankability" falling and her choice of roles shrinking, she made a few smaller films of arguable merit, whereupon, wanting to be with her two small sons, she withdrew. When they were grown, she became the emissary of the United Nations to the starving, plagued, abandoned children of the world, traveling tirelessly both to advertise their cause and to raise money to advance it.
At the end, sick and doomed, she returned to Switzerland, where she'd lived for many years, to die and be buried in her chosen village - an exit of the consummate grace and dignity that had won her the love of the world.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.