The woman who brought her fragile, indelible grace to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961) and “Charade” (1963), “My Fair Lady” (1964), “Sabrina” (1954) and “Two for the Road” (1967) died last week of cancer at 63 at her home in Tolochenaz, Switzerland, outside Lausanne. As much an epitome of class in life as on screen, she had tirelessly devoted herself since 1988 to her work as an ambassador for UNICEF. Last year her trip to Somalia helped focus the world’s attention on that tragic land. Her dedication to the cause of suffering children derived from personal experience: as a teenager in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands she and her mother had survived eating tulip bulbs. She emerged from the war malnourished, anemic and asthmatic.
The mysterious accent came naturally. Born in Belgium to a Dutch baroness and an English-Irish banker who vanished from her life when she was 6, Hepburn was raised in Brussels, England and the Netherlands. Her dream was to become a dancer, and after the war she got a scholarship to study ballet in London. But increasingly, she found herself playing bit parts in such English screen comedies as “Laughter in Paradise” and “The Lavender Hill Mob.” While performing a small role in a movie called “Monte Carlo Baby” on the Riviera she caught the eye of none other than Colette, who saw in her gamine charm the perfect actress for the role of “Gigi” on Broadway. Almost simultaneously, director William Wyler came to London looking for an unknown to star in “Roman Holiday.” Her success was instant and complete. In 1954, the 24-year-old newcomer-described by Cecil Beaton as “looking like a Modigliani on which the paint has hardly dried”-won both an Oscar for her first starring role in Wyler’s romance and a Tony for her Broadway performance in “Ondine.” Her costar in that play was Mel Ferrer, whom she married that year.
Her life seemed to share the Cinderella quality of her famous film roles. A product of the last era of the studio system, she reigned as a star for 15 years, working almost exclusively with Hollywood royalty-three films with William Wyler and Stanley Donen, two with Billy Wilder (“Sabrina” and “Love in the Afternoon”), movies with Fred Zinnemann (“The Nun’s Story”), King Vidor (“War and Peace”), George Cukor (“My Fair Lady”), John Huston (“The Unforgiven”) and Blake Edwards (“Tiffany’s”). Her leading men were the giants of the screen, usually decades her senior-Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, Fred Astaire, Rex Harrison, Cary Grant. She transfixed and transformed them with her delicate romantic eagerness. It’s been noted by such feminist film critics as Molly Haskell and Carrie Rickey how often a buried Oedipal and incest motif runs through her movies, yet in spite of (or because of?) the undercurrents in these May-December love stories, she retained an aura of chaste spirituality. Even as Truman Capote’s fast-and-loose party girl Holly Golightly, Hepburn seemed more spirit than flesh. She was perhaps the last of the immaculate Hollywood romantic icons.
The movies and the country were undergoing a sexual sea change when she bowed out of film in 1967, after her Oscar-nominated performance as a blind woman terrorized by a murderer in “Wait Until Dark.” The era of studio-lit glamour had ended; the funkier, more freewheeling spirit that seized Hollywood didn’t leave much room for her haute couture profile, her fine-china reticence. She stayed away from the cameras for nine years, raising her son by Ferrer in Switzerland and another son by her second husband, Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti.
Hepburn returned, with heartbreaking grace, in “Robin and Marian” in 1976, opposite Sean Connery, but worked in only two feature films after that before making her final cameo appearance as an angel in Steven Spielberg’s “Always.” At the Oscars this coming March 29, she will posthumously receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. In 1991, accompanied by her companion of more than a decade, Robert Wolders, she attended a gala Lincoln Center tribute in her honor. Onstage, in front of an adoring crowd, as poised as a young ballerina, her modest, soft-spoken incandescence burned as brightly as ever. Hepburn’s timeless elegance defined her time; her spirit is irreplaceable.
