Audrey Hepburn: Gamin, Princess, Always Memorable

Although her movie career spanned four decades, and she had a tremendous influence on fashion and filmmaking, Audrey Hepburn didn't make all that many pictures.

It's just that most of those she did make were memorable in some way. Few of the 19 movies in which she starred have been forgotten, and even those in which she played minor roles are fondly remembered for her contribution.

The chic, slim actress not only demonstrated great taste by choosing her scripts carefully. She knew how to keep us interested, and, especially in her later years, she left us impatient for more. When she died yesterday at 63 at her home in Switzerland (she had undergone colon cancer surgery last October), she left a unique legacy.

Competing with Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly during her peak years in the 1950s and 1960s, Hepburn demonstrated an uncanny skill for changing her image. Born near Brussels in May 1929, she spent World War II in a Nazi-occupied Dutch town. She had known persecution and starvation first-hand, and she had a wider range as an actress than many at first suspected.

She refused to be typed in movies, jumping from gamin roles in 1950s comedies to the severity of "The Nun's Story" to Truman Capote's would-be sophisticate in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to her most complex and demanding role: Albert Finney's much-tested wife in "Two For the Road," Stanley Donen and Frederic Raphael's 1967 comedy-drama about the trials of a 20th century marriage.

Even those who weren't wild about King Vidor's 1956 condensation of "War and Peace" now have a difficult time seeing anyone else as Natasha. When Steven Spielberg wanted someone to play an angel in 1989's "Always," her last movie, the role again became indelibly hers.

In a series of 1950s vehicles in which she was paired with significantly older men, she managed to make plausible her on-screen romantic relationships with Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and Fred Astaire. And could anyone else have played Rima the bird girl in "Green Mansions" without making us laugh?

Hepburn was worshipped at Radio City Music Hall, where so many of her best pictures opened and ran for months, establishing her as a star with a devoted urban following. "The Nun's Story" was an unexpected smash there, and so were Donen's "Funny Face," a sublime musical that didn't charm the rest of the country quite as much as it did New York, and Donen's "Charade," in which she slyly sidestepped Cary Grant's advances by telling him she couldn't possibly find room for anyone else in her life until one of her friends died.

She was also effective as the tortured schoolteacher in "The Children's Hour," the tormented blind lady in "Wait Until Dark," the aging Maid Marian in "Robin and Marian," and the wise heroine of Peter Bogdanovich's underrated romantic comedy, "They All Laughed." If she seemed miscast as the Cockney flower girl, Eliza Dolittle, in the 1964 movie of "My Fair Lady," she did manage to pull off the character's transformation in the picture's second half.

Hepburn won her first and only Academy Award 39 years ago for William Wyler's still-wonderful romantic comedy, "Roman Holiday," in which she charmed everyone with her performance as a frustrated princess who runs away to spend a day with a commoner (Gregory Peck). It wasn't her first movie - she had played small roles in the British comedies, "Laughter in Paradise" and "The Lavender Hill Mob" - but it was the first one that mattered.

In Danny Peary's new book, "Alternative Oscars," in which the author suggests year-by-year how the Academy Awards should have been given, Peary argues that the Motion Picture Academy should have waited until she played Joanna in "Two For the Road" to give Hepburn the Oscar:

"Joanna is especially memorable because the older, more experienced Hepburn finally had to dig into herself to understand and play a character. She gives a mature, perceptive performance, without sacrificing any of the charm that always made viewers automatically love her."

It could also be argued that she deserved the Oscar for her extraordinarily disciplined work in "The Nun's Story," for which she did win the New York Film Critics' prize for best actress in 1959, and her dead-on performance as Holly Golightly in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," a romanticized, somewhat watered-down 1961 version of Capote's novella that somehow still seems ahead of its time.

Last week, the Academy recognized Hepburn for the first time since her 1968 nomination for "Wait Until Dark," by voting to give her the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award when the Oscars are handed out March 29.

Hepburn became a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF in 1986, visiting Africa and appealing to governments for money. She was still traveling through 1992, visiting Somalia and Kenya last fall.

"I've never known anything about politics," she said in a 1990 Associated Press interview on her work with UNICEF. "I just care terribly because I saw so much as a child about suffering and the suffering of children."

When she entered a Los Angeles hospital Oct. 30, doctors who expected a digestive ailment from her African travels instead found colon cancer. She died at her house on Lake Geneva.

Earlier this month, too ill to return to L.A. to accept a Screen Actors Guild honor, Hepburn sent a message thanking all her directors and co-stars.

"It is they," she said, "who helped and honed, triggered and taught, pushed and pulled, dressed and photographed, and with endless patience, and kindness . . . guided and nurtured a totally unknown, insecure, inexperienced, skinny broad into a marketable commodity."

------------------------ WORKS BY AUDREY HEPBURN: ------------------------

FILMS

"One Wild Oat," 1951.

"Young Wives' Tale," 1951.

"Laughter in Paradise," 1951.

"The Lavender Hill Mob," 1951.

"Monte Carlo Baby," 1951.

"The Secret People," 1952.

"Roman Holiday," 1953.

"Sabrina," 1954.

"War and Peace," 1956.

"Funny Face," 1957.

"Love in the Afternoon," 1957.

"Green Mansions," 1959.

"The Nun's Story," 1959.

"The Unforgiven," 1960.

"Breakfast at Tiffany's," 1961.

"The Children's Hour," 1962.

"Charade," 1963.

"Paris When It Sizzles," 1964.

"My Fair Lady," 1964.

"How to Steal a Million," 1966.

"Two for the Road," 1967.

"Wait Until Dark," 1967.

"Robin and Marian," 1976.

"Bloodline," 1979.

"They All Laughed," 1981.

"Always," 1989.

PLAYS

"Gigi," 1951.

"Ondine," 1954.

The Associated Press