How Audrey Hepburn gained the attention of all Hollywood


Thin, long-legged, with an exquisite fragility, Audrey Hepburn possessed a pixieish charm gaining the attention of Hollywood in the process and being cast in her first major film role in Roman Holiday (1953). Success came quickly. Roman Holiday was a box-office winner, and Audrey Hepburn took top honors with an Academy Award for Best Actress. During the next dozen years she made only 15 films, but a great many of them were either critical or box-office smashes, or both.

Curiously, Audrey Hepburn was often cast with much older men as her love interests. Perhaps her fragile, childlike quality seemed to require the balance of a more powerful fatherly figure. For instance, there was HUMPHREY BOGART in Sabrina (1954), which brought her a second Oscar nomination, FRED ASTAIRE in Funny Face (1957), GARY COOPER in Love in the Afternoon (1957), CARY GRANT in Charade (1963), and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1964).

Audrey Hepburn reached the height of her fame with a series of major hits, including The Nun’s Story (1959), for which she received her third Oscar nomination, The Unforgiven (1960), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), bringing her a fourth Best Actress nomination, Charade, Paris When It Sizzles (1964), and My Fair Lady, her biggest hit.

It was two years before Audrey Hepburn appeared in another film, the slight caper movie How to Steal a Million (1966), but then she played in the sophisticated marital drama Two for the Road (1967) and surprised audiences still further with her effective portrayal of a blind woman fighting for her life in the thriller Wait Until Dark (1967), for which Audrey Hepburn won her fifth Oscar nomination as Best Actress.

In 1968 Audrey Hepburn’s marriage to actor Mel Ferrer (they married in 1954) came to an end and, with it, so ended her Hollywood career for nearly a decade. The following year Audrey Hepburn wed a doctor and retired from the film business, living a relatively quiet life in Rome. She was finally lured back to the big screen in 1976 to play Maid Marian to SEAN CONNERY’s Robin Hood in Robin and Marian, a gentle comedy about heroes who grow old.

Audrey Hepburn’s return to the movies was ballyhooed in the press, but she didn’t pursue her acting career with much vigor thereafter. She made the mistake of starring in Bloodline (1979) and followed it with yet another poor choice when she joined the cast of PETER BOGDANOVICH’s They All Laughed (1981). Audrey Hepburn appeared in STEVEN SPIELBERG’s Always (1989) and later received the JEAN HERSHOLT Award for humanitarian work posthumously.

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