Icons
Icon of the month: Audrey Hepburn
Catherine von Ruhland
Even today, this black and white still of Audrey Hepburn (as
Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's) is being reprinted on
posters, bags and clothes. It is as familiar to teenage girls in
2011 as those who saw the film 50 years ago.
The image is full of contradictions. The sparkle of diamonds and
pearls, set against the deep velvet black of Hepburn's kohled eyes,
ooze glamour. Her arm-length gloves and sleek Givenchy gown are
themselves icons of fashion. Yet Golightly is a high-class escort.
Truman Capote, who wrote the novella on which Blake Edwards'
film is loosely based, had envisaged the more sexually-overt
Marilyn Monroe in the role, and considered Hepburn hopelessly
miscast. Her previous films had hardly required any seductive
technique. She'd even played the lead in A Nun's Story.
This screen innocence didn't seem suited to portraying a whore,
and Hepburn herself admitted 'I can't play a hooker'. Nevertheless
she was nominated for the 1962 Academy Award for Best Actress.
Where Monroe would have put everything up front, Hepburn captured
the imagination of the viewer in a much more subtle way.
Beneath the chic sheen is a beautiful doe-eyed young woman.
Hepburn knew she was no Elizabeth Taylor or Ava Gardner, yet her
demure attraction has proved to have an enduring appeal. What
is so striking about the image is how sexually unthreatening she
appears. Yes she is gorgeous, but there is also a girl-next-door
shining through. You can see it in the opening scene of
Breakfast at Tiffany's where, still in her full-length evening
dress the morning after the night before, she peruses the window of
the eponymous store. Indeed, her plait from the film was
recently voted the most influential hairstyle ever, even above 'The
Rachel' worn by Jennifer Aniston in Friends.
There's something about how Hepburn, a trained ballet dancer,
carries herself.
She wears that dress with an easy grace. To girls, she seems to
be saying that, actually, rather than being about sex, this is what
I enjoy wearing and feel comfortable in, and you shouldn't be
afraid to wear what you like either. And also, all you need
is an eye pencil, mascara, some lippy and you're good to
go.
The jaundiced onlooker might think, 'Ah, but that thrown-on air
is precisely because the actress is portraying a very practiced
hooker'. I'd like to suggest it's Hepburn's innate modesty that
shines through, whether she is dressed to the nines or wearing a
pair of well-cut slacks, heels and a crisp white blouse.
We should celebrate the fact that Audrey's image is
everywhere. Earlier this year, in a poll listing the biggest
screen sirens, she came second only to a cartoon. Her decorum
challenges the contemporary insistence that a women's value
increases the more she disrobes (think Rhianna, Beyonce, Britney
and Lady Gaga). But it also brings into question the flipside
Christian legalism that presumes female modesty is merely about
limiting the kind of clothes a gal can wear (and tellingly, never
teaching men to respect women however they're dressed).
Hepburn claimed 'enormous faith' rather than adherence to any
religion in particular, though her first marriage and the baptism
of her son ('a gift of God') took place in the Protestant church
close to her Swiss home. A lifelong humanitarian, in her
later years she visited a range of countries as an ambassador of
Unicef. Her compassion had been forged both by her Christian
Scientist mother and the privations and horrors she had witnessed
growing up in Calvinist Holland under Nazi occupation. It was
said that her slight frame was due to wartime malnutrition. Truman
Capote had misread Audrey Hepburn's apparent innocence. It
had taken a core of steel to be that lovely.