Saturdays with the Stars: Audrey Hepburn

Each month of 2024 we are taking a look at an actress who bore the title "America's Sweetheart" during the peak of her film fame, and what she did with the title (including when it was passed on to the next Hollywood princess).  Last month, we talked about June Allyson, one of the few top tier movie stars of the 1940's to earn the moniker of "America's Sweetheart" in an era when the title wasn't really fashionable for screen stars.  In the 1950's, though, this moniker was shared by three major actresses, and we're going to profile them all over the next three months.  We're going to start with the woman who may have earned the title pretty much overnight with her big-screen splash in 1953, which won her an Oscar (the only one of the three women to pull off this feat in a competitive category, though the others were nominated).  This month's star is Audrey Hepburn.

Hepburn was born to aristocratic Dutch parents, the daughter of a Baroness on her mother's side and to a British trading executive (who also happened to be Jewish) on her father's side.  Hepburn's childhood reads like a film itself, with her father abandoning her when she was six, and her mother supporting the Fascist movement in Britain, and even meeting Adolf Hitler before eventually turning against Nazism while the family starved in the Netherlands during World War II (during which time Audrey's uncle was executed for joining the resistance and her brother was sent to a labor camp).  After the war, Hepburn moved with her mother to Amsterdam, training in the ballet, eventually getting work as a chorus girl in London.  There she started to get jobs in the British film industry, appearing in bit parts, but it was as the titular role in the original stage production of Gigi on Broadway, which was a smash success, touring all across the country, where she got her first major film role in Roman Holiday.

The rest, as they say, was history.  Hepburn's work in Roman Holiday made her an Oscar-winning actress, and became the motif for the "Hollywood Princess" Best Actress win that would later be used by Grace Kelly, Julie Andrews, & Halle Berry in their Oscar campaigns.  So much would she fill this motif, that we're going to cheat a little bit here, as Hepburn was not American, though in this case she was beloved by American audiences (a proviso I needed to add after my mom pointed this technicality out to me) and is frequently referred to as "America's Sweetheart."  Hepburn is one of the rare actresses where I've seen most of her major roles, so while we'll talk about them this month, along with the unique career she'd have in the two decades after Roman Holiday, we're also going to investigate some of the lesser-known roles, and hopefully find some undiscovered gems in the career of one of the Golden Age's most recognizable figures.