Film's Fairest Lady Audrey Hepburn 1929-1993

By JAY COCKS

Of all the wonderful closings in movies, one in particular comes to mind now. A journalist has just given up, for love, the biggest story of his life. He has also surrendered the love of his life, all for the sake of a young woman. A most unlikely situation, a dramatic confectioner's creation. Reality has no place in this fantasy. Until the ending. And until now.

The journalist has just left the young woman to her job, which is being a princess. They will not see each other again. The camera stays with him as he walks through the sepulchral rooms of some vast Roman palazzo, and his face shows everything: the loss, the melancholy, the love, the sweetness of feelings found fleetingly, then lost irretrievably.

This scene, the end of William Wyler's Roman Holiday, is memorable for reasons that can never be taught in film school. Wyler had a fierce sense of emotional focus, and he had here a consummate movie star, Gregory Peck. But this great scene would have been nonsense if Peck did not have something wonderful and irreplaceable to miss. He had Audrey Hepburn.

It was her first major film role, the one that introduced her to the world and made her a star. It also defined her -- as starmaking parts will -- in film and in life. When she died last week of cancer, at 63, it was as if we had to surrender the marvelous princess of all our better dreams.

Born in Belgium in 1929, she spent her adolescence in World War II Holland. She lost family to the Nazis, often went desperately hungry, and occasionally carried messages for the Resistance in her shoes. The war was a horror, but it left no discernible scars. Perhaps that was a little part of her magic: after slaughter and in the midst of chilling political uncertainty, the world found a grace in her that it yearned for. She seemed serene, but she was quick to laughter. She was ethereal -- she gave a credible performance as Rima, the bird creature in Green Mansions -- but she could be sensual and knowing, whether in the mock innocence of her Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's, or, later, in the painful cunning of the beleaguered wife in Two for the Road. Surely she must have been thoroughly sick of hearing all about her gamin quality, her elfin smile, her graciousness and class, even though we have the strong impression that she was too gracious and too classy to say so.

She had, as an actress, a tremendous tensile strength that helped anchor the unforced ebullience of her personality. When a film required it, she could really dig in her heels. Billy Wilder's Sabrina, which quickly followed Roman Holiday, showed her torn between the smooth bachelor blandishments of William Holden and the tempered, literally businesslike attentions of Humphrey Bogart. Hepburn made the right choice -- the heart's choice -- as she would continue to do in all her best-remembered movies. Past the sorcery of her sensuality, with its inviolate innocence, and past her great beauty, Hepburn wooed and won her audience because she always played a character whose heart, if occasionally misplaced, could in the end be trusted and even envied.

She played the star as she had played the princess, as if by natural right. But that was another part of the game, and one she played with great generosity. She spoke often of her indebtedness to other actors, and the directors who brought out and shaped what was best and most vulnerable and most beguiling in her: Wyler, of course, who began everything; Wilder, with whom she made her most sportive romantic comedies; King Vidor, for whom she played an exquisite Natasha in War and Peace; John Huston, in whose The Unforgiven she portrayed a frontier girl of mixed blood and uncertain allegiances; Stanley Donen, who fine-tuned her sprightliness in Funny Face and enhanced her eldritch sophistication in Charade beside Cary Grant; George Cukor, for whom she played an effervescent Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady; and Richard Lester, who gave her the most memorable role of her later years opposite Sean Connery in Robin and Marian.

Although she had been, for a time in her early years, a dancer, it was still difficult to believe, watching Hepburn, that anyone could embody such grace. This was not just a matter of movement, although she was purest quicksilver. It was more a quality of spirit, a kind of emotional fluency and serenity. The press, responding to this, was always kind, and stayed pretty much out of her private life. She was married and divorced twice (her first husband was Mel Ferrer, who acted opposite her in War and Peace and directed her in Green Mansions). In recent years she lived in Switzerland and threw her energies into arduous and prolonged charity work for UNICEF; she traveled, most lately, to Somalia and appeared on television making early pleas for an end to the devastation.

Her last film appearance was in the Steven Spielberg romantic fantasy Always. She played an angel, and she was radiant, doing, as well as she ever had, what she always did: working with a great director, bringing to her part an unforced sovereignty of spirit, fulfilling, with no apparent effort whatsoever, our need to believe in the finest parts of what may only be a dream. It was Gregory Peck's dream in Roman Holiday, and now we all know his loss.