Audrey Hepburn or Katherine Hepburn?

Would have been KH's birthday today, so I played this clip from Woman of the Year for a grade 8 class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H00_NJtbJY

First time--I should have been playing this clip for the last 20 years! All that eye-play when they first look at each other--amazing.

Saw a restoration of Roman Holiday today. Just love it--for me, in the first rank of American B&W sound films, up there with Double Indemnity, Kane, On the Waterfront, Sweet Smell of Success, a handful more. Not AH's first film--IMDB has it as her eighth, including one famous one (The Lavender Hill Mob), but the roles must have all been small enough that the opening credits say "Introducing Audrey Hepburn." (And "Presenting Gregory Peck.") It's perfect from start to finish, and the last scene, the press conference, is an amazing sustained bit of acting by both of them almost wholly expressed in gestures and glances. In a few of Stanley Kauffmann's books, he would append a "Reviewings" section where he'd go and look back on three or four of his favourite films. (The thing that first prompted me to see Roman Holiday in the '80s.) His Roman Holiday piece is in Before My Eyes--will reread that tonight.

I assume the film primarily (or wholly) springs from the coronation of Elizabeth II the year before, but I tend to view stuff from the '50s as it relates to the arrival of rock and roll in '55. And Roman Holiday feels like a tiny stirring--someone trapped in a stratified life, complaining that "everything we do is so wholesome," dying to break out. Which she does, for 24 hours.

(Must have come out just before Dalton Trumbo getting blacklisted; his name is prominent in the credits twice.)

Audrey in Lavender Hill Mob is a very short appearance indeed...around 20 seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mjcfTOJ4Nc

Wow--like Richard Dreyfuss in The Graduate.

I might be wrong about Trumbo. Seems that he wrote the script before the blacklist? Maybe his name was restored at some point.

Yeah first time I watched Lavender Hill Mob I had no idea of the Audrey bit part and it was a real WAIT WHAT moment.

Audrey Hepburn's accent in My Fair Lady is absolutely excruciating - without even the excuse of being American. New Year, new confession, I can't stand Audrey Hepburn.

Any time I see her in anything I wonder where the hell that accent comes from. It cannot be Belgian or Dutch.

What was happening in the 60s to explain all these gorblimey cockney knees ups in musicals: My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, Half a Sixpence, Oliver? There's probably others too.

Audrey Hepburn's accent in My Fair Lady is absolutely excruciating - without even the excuse of being American. New Year, new confession, I can't stand Audrey Hepburn.

― The Italian Yob (Tom D.), Monday, 1 January 2024 16:56 (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

in everything tbh

I never noticed til today that these two actors with entirely discrete careers had the same last name

well katharine pronounced it hep-burn and audrey pronounced it "hebbehhhnnehenb"

Lmao

pls note i am still in love with her for every second she is on screen tbf

She plays the dumbest blind woman who ever tapped a sidewalk in Wait Until Dark, and I can't watch Breakfast at Tiffany's without breaking things, but she had the intended effect in Roman Holiday and The Nun's Story.

Never made it past Rooney's first appearance in Tiffany's. I love Audrey in other stuff though! I watched How To Steal A Million again recently and it's great and she's great

that is an example of a movie with a nice poster. movie itself eh

perhaps i too am all style and no substance. in 2024 i am trying to be aware of glass houses and stuff.

You live in a Peter O'Toole heist movie?

i do not usually like to give out personal information, but yes

Love her to death, and also--Rooney excepted; I can't remove from the film--love Breakfast at Tiffany's--the party scene, John McGiver, Buddy Ebsen pulling away on the bus, Audrey on the windowsill singing "Moon River."

"remove him"

And, yes--"singing."

Actually, I guess she does sing...I must have known that.

i remember hearing some recording of her efforts for my fair lady and she wasnt at all bad tbf

Also I know it was a big deal at the time but Rex Harrison's sprechgesang thing gets old very quickly.

turns out he couldn't talk to the animals

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYbRQWbQ4q4

Love her to death, and also--Rooney excepted; I can't remove from the film--love _Breakfast at Tiffany's_--the party scene, John McGiver, Buddy Ebsen pulling away on the bus, Audrey on the windowsill singing "Moon River."

Also Audrey in Funny Face, except for that ghoulish ad that used footage from it a few years back, it’s wonderful.

I know it's fish in a barrel to talk about gender relations in a lot of these old movies but Astaire in "Funny Face" singing that song that's like "girl you look grotesque but I'd still hit it" to Audrey Hepburn really is insane.

Recommend Paris When It Sizzles, a metacomedy featuring Hepburn and William Holden, the latter being a frustrated writer working on a terrible caper film called The Girl Who Stole The Eiffel Tower. They have Sinatra come in just to sing the theme tune (the girl who stole the Eiffel tower/she also stole my heart).

without signing off on any content as such, if you cant watch a 1937 or whatever movie for what it is then i think we might consider whether the warning sticker should be placed on the viewer instead of the dvd case

What was happening in the 60s to explain all these gorblimey cockney knees ups in musicals: My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, Half a Sixpence, Oliver? There's probably others too.

Britain hugely in fashion but the audience for this type of thing too square for British Invasion or movies with Michael Caine having sex so this was the triangulation?

darra I can do that and also still laugh at that moment, actually

i didnt doubt it!

What was happening in the 60s to explain all these gorblimey cockney knees ups in musicals: My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, Half a Sixpence, Oliver?

Big long post follows (apologies as only faintly relevant to Audrey).

Ans = I think three things colliding: two directly related (kitchen sink meets a boom-time for musicals), one less (the beatles: i’ll explain in a moment)

Kitchen Sink was a movement centred on “authentic" downbeat urban topics expressed in “authentic" non-posh accents, which was on the move from the page and the stage to the UK screen, and from the north of England to London. Its politics was an uneasy — generally fairly gloomy — exploration of the nature and limits of class-bound cultural aspiration; its central energy was a generation of actors and writers very committed to using and depicting their own experience. For years before the 50s it that seemed like John Laurie was seemingly the only person in British film encouraged to “be himself” on celluloid, and every screen cockney was a posh kid badly faking it. Now you could make your birth identity a selling point for employment (poor old Robert Lindsay, born and raised in Derbyshire, has made woebegone complaint about not getting the memo… ): anyway London has a rich theatrical tradition among all classes, and the new settlement of course included 1 x fvckton of london-born actors and artistes, hungry to experiment with possibility, obvious or otherwise

The boomtime for musicals, in Broadway and Hollywood as well as the West End, meant that the industry was just wildly trawling through all past endeavour, looking for quirky IPs to grab up and revive: hence My Fair Lady (1956, from Shaw’s 1913 Pygmalion), Mary Poppins (1964, from a sequence of children’s books about this character, striating in 1934), Half a Sixpence (1963, from H.G.Wells’s first and autobiographical 1905 novel Kipps), Oliver! (1968, from 1838’s Oliver Twist) and more. All of the originals are also studies in cross-class encounter, though taken from across a full century, the myths and possibilities of this are very differently grasped and deployed, especially when jammed into the respective US and UK class-and-culture battles of the 1950s and 60s. My Fair Lady is I think the primary generator — it was a huge hit on stage and screen, and survived the controversial casting of Audrey H (as a well known face) in place of Julie Andrews (established the role , beloved, able to sing; got Poppins instead so didn’t miss out). Poppins is very much cockneyed up, probably as a consequence of MFL’s success: the Dick Van Dyke role is a composite of more than one character in the books, and even so the role is expanded. Half a Sixpence was written for Tommy Steele as he transitioned from top pop skiffler to the old-school vaudeville mainstream. Oliver! was the brainchild of Stepney-born Lionel Bart, whose parents were Jewish refugees from Galicia and who had also crossed paths with Steele.

There’s a solid crosspoint for these two streams, semi-forgotten now but important at the time: a 1960 production called Fings Ain’t What they Used T’Be, worked up by (of course) Joan Littlewood at the Stratford East Theatre Royal, semi-earnestly about cockney gangs and prostitutes and corrupt policemen, a huge hit that transferred to the actual-real west end and also a best-selling OST LP. Music by Lionel Bart: Max Bygraves (for it is he) put a (censured) version of the title hit into the charts, but the combined casts are just a who’s-who host of soon-to-be-beloved figures on-stage and vinyl, among them Barbara Windsor, Yootha Joyce, George Sewell, Alfie Bass, Adam Faith, Sid James, Alfred Marks, and even (lord luvaduck) Sean Connery…

As for the third, well, the Beatles are (a) why Kitchen Sink when it landed in London bedded in so weird, I suspect, because their very unexpected global success threw out all the rules abt what worked in the industry and what was wanted (bcz no one in charge the fvck knew anything anymore), and also the rules about the cultural aspirations of those with non-posh backgrounds: the authenticity of the working-class voice became a kind of substrate surrealism swimming in and out of the theatrical and musical past. And (b) as Daniel says, they made “English accents” a hip and sexy idea in the industry at large, and of course in America especially, cockney was just so much handily available scouse…

censored not censured

also 1956 is the date of my fair lady on stage: the film is 1964

GBS, HG Wells and Dickens were certainly interesting choices for musicals!

i raise you chitty chitty bang bang, dr dolittle and the von trapps

The available clips of Audrey H singing Eliza suggest that she'd have been fine, but this was still very much not how it worked in Hollywood musicals

i found this quote (via quora) from http://www.julieandrewsonline.com/news/1960_news/maccalls_1966.html:

Did you do any special studying before you tackled Eliza?

JA: I ran the original movie with Wendy Hiller* over and over again and bawled every time. I studied cockney with an American professor of phonetics – here I was English, learning cockney from an American! – but I'm not very good at accents. Most of the work, I frankly confess, happened during performances – I didn't know what I was doing until about three months after we opened. Even with all of Moss Hart's help, I had to learn onstage, so to speak, and it's the best way to learn – if you can get away with it!

*(viz PYGMALION, 1938, in which hiller, born cheshire, was apparently first person to say "bloody" in a british film: "not bloody likely!")

mr doolittle in that version is an absolute marvel, disgusting

The available clips of Audrey H singing Eliza suggest that she'd have been fine, but this was still very much not how it worked in Hollywood musicals

― emishi sun hack (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 2 January 2024 12:58 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

It's worth pointing out too that Jeremy Brett was apparently rather a good singer but they decided not to use his voice and so ruined the best song in the film by shooting him wandering around in the middle distance so you couldn't see his lips move.

Audrey is at her best and worst in Charade, on Amazon now and one of my comfort movies.

Oof -- scanning the thread spoiled it a bit to find out they were actually related, but only distantly. I rather liked the possibility they were identical twins but were in a real life Parent Trap situation.

Anyways, Kate Mulgrew (and Dana Carvey) are always shoe-ins for a Kathere-inactor but who could credibly be Audrey?

Because it's not Jennifer Love Hewitt!
https://static.wixstatic.com/media/021143_1601fe32acb64d36834548c7b7a89077.jpg/v1/crop/x_295,y_217,w_1719,h_2322/fill/w_388,h_688,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/heplovex.jpg

Tavi Gevinson?

Ariana Grande imo

chan marshall could have summoned the vibe at one time

they tried with Audrey Tatou but it never really took

It's curious how Audrey Hepburn suggests a shorter actress when she actually stood 5'7". Ariana Grande is 5'1" and Tavi Gevinson 5 feet even.

Yes I noticed she was pretty tall in My Fair Lady.