How do we account for the continued popularity of Audrey Hepburn? Ask your parents or grandparents about her and they’ll mention Roman Holiday, Funny Face, My Fair Lady, Charade, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and almost no one has anything critical to say about her. She’s beautiful. She’s fabulous. She’s Audrey.
Is it too simple just to say that she was a movie star, in that old time way that movie stars used to be larger than life, more glamorous than any star seems to achieve these days, and so she sticks in our collective consciousness? As do Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Liz Taylor, Charlton Heston.
What it boils down to for Heburn is class. Hepburn had class – style, couture, grace, savoir faire. Watch her in Sabrina. Even when she’s playing the chauffeur’s daughter, before she’s gone to Europe and hobnobbed with culture, she has that class. The only thing different about her when she comes back is she has fashion – gorgeous dresses designed by Hubert de Givenchy and Edith Head.
(You know Edith Head. She’s the fashion designer Brad Bird caricatured as Edna Mode or “E” in The Incredibles, the designer of their costumes. The real Head, a legend, designed costumes for over 400 movies, from 1927 until 1980. We don’t know if any of them had capes.)
We don’t really need to belabor the point here. To watch Hepburn in Sabrina is to see, to understand star power, to know what was so compelling about her. The other stars in the film – and they were big (Humphrey Bogart and William Holden) – seem to pale when she’s around.
Perhaps a more interesting line of inquisition is why so few Hollywood actors today can achieve this? Certainly part of it is the studio system which no longer exists. The studios controlled, rigidly, the public personae of their stars, and they were able to amplify and shape them into the gods and goddesses we remember. Today things are different; the central publicity machines are missing and the Internet is here, where anyone with a digital camera can catch you nude, overweight, and having a bad hair day on a beach, then post the pictures on their blog for everyone to see. We live in an age in which the sheer volume of personal, and often unflattering data, destroys any possibility of one’s mythologization.
Russell Crowe. Didn’t he hit some guy with a telephone? Julia Roberts is one of the highest paid actresses in Hollywood. Fans are equally aware of her movies and her tempestuous love life.
Myth cannot exist in a world of trivial minutiae that diminishes star status. This is true not only of movie stars but presidents (a 2005 book about Abraham Lincoln claimed he might have been homosexual – the claim is disputed by most historians – and recent revelations about John F. Kennedy’s indiscretions in the White House have done a bit to tarnish his Camelot image), civil rights leaders (historians have argued that some of Martin Luther King’s academic papers and speeches contained plagiarism), and sports heroes (steroids, anyone?).
If anything, watching Audrey Hepburn now allows us to return to a time when we were allowed to have movie stars, and they could exist in a bubble unpunctured by too much information. Could Audrey Hepburn, the glamorous, the embodiment of class, exist as a star today? We think not. That’s why we can revel in and honor her as the star of movies like Sabrina.
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
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