When Hollywood Legends were asked about Audrey Hepburn

Stop looking at the dress. Look at the hands. Those hands draped elegantly over a cigarette holder in Breakfast at Tiffany's? They once smuggled secret messages to the Dutch resistance. They carried nothing but wooden shoes because leather didn't exist in 1944. There's so many images that will never go away. Such as we were on the radio, we were told to stay indoors, the country had been invaded, to not even appear at the windows, to close the curtains and so forth. Telling me that, of course, I was behind the curtains and I saw these German tanks come in for hours, marching, driving. And the Holland fell after five days because it's a small country with a small army and they fought very bravely but there was no way of holding back the German army and all of that is history now. Then followed five years and of course you say, oh my god, isn't that terrible? Five years of German occupation, which it was. A child is a child is a child who lived by the day. Obviously it was much worse for my mother in a sense than for my family and just went to school. Except that I was shoved into a Dutch school right away, not knowing a word of Dutch. Because my mother was worried about this child speaking English in the streets and Germans all around and she thought that was rather dangerous. So that was a traumatic experience to end up in a huge classroom not knowing what word that was being said and every time I opened my mouth everybody roaring with laugh. That's just great at that age but it's a great way to learn a language, you know. I can speak Dutch. Then little by little, yes, there was a knock on the door and they took my uncle away who six months later was shot and another uncle too. And my brothers went underground. My uncles were the first hostages to be shot in Holland and it was actually the turning point because from that day on an underground was formed. Because for the first few months we didn't know quite what had happened. We thought perhaps we're just going to be nicely occupied and you know our freedom would be this. And that's when really the hard time started. Can you picture it? A starving ballerina dancing on frozen canals during the hunger winter while Nazi patrols marched just meters away. That girl grew up to redefine beauty for the entire planet. But here's the kicker. Hollywood didn't create her. She created Hollywood's conscience. I was the luckiest man in the world I think to make God's first picture Roman holiday. It's a happy month in Rome year 1950. Some of you may remember the story of the princess incognito on the town to escape her royal duty. Meet the newspaper man. Falls in love in the end. They sacrifice that love she to return to her royal duties as the future queen and he to his newspaper job. Well there is no doubt that the princess did become a queen. Not only on the screen one of the most loved, one of the most skillful, one of the most intelligent, one of the most sensitive, charming actresses and prince in my life. Walk with her for a second. She wins the Oscar for her first film 1953. She doesn't even show up to the ceremony because she's filming Sabrina. Let that sink in. She didn't care about the gold. She cared about the rehearsal. The American Film Institute ranks her number three of all time. But she looks at her own face and says I don't think I'm a great actress. Is that humility? Or is that the psychology of a woman who watched her own brother get taken away by the Gestapo? She defied the 50s bombshell blueprint. She was thin when voluptuous was law. She was gammy when glamour was the rule. As praise and sentiment might make him leave the room. But one can't just work with a wonderful, witty, tender, brilliant, unique, genius, and not at least say thank you. Thank you, Billy, for letting me do Sabrina and Love in the Afternoon with you. Billy Wilder nailed it. You couldn't touch her. Not because she was fragile, but because she was steel wrapped in silk. Fact, she could recite Shakespeare in Dutch. Fact, she survived on tulip bulbs to stay alive during the war. Fact, she was spotted by the writer Colette at a train station. Colette looked at her and screamed, there is our Gigi. Imagine being that magnetic. That a stranger looks at you in a crowd and your destiny is sealed. She walks away from Hollywood in her 50s. She doesn't fade. She chooses to walk. She spends her final decades holding children dying of starvation. The same starvation she survived. The princess was a soldier. The star was a survivor. The icon was a ghost who learned to smile. Decades later, Hollywood still tries to replicate her. They cast girls with big eyes and short hair, but they missed the secret ingredient. Now let's stop admiring the portrait. Let's dissect the DNA. Let's hear what the titans of Tinseltown really whispered about the waif who conquered them all. I want to take a look here at your mother, Audrey Hepburn, on the Phil Donahue Show, January 1990. And she's talking about this very thing, Sean, about when she was shooting Roman holiday, she was 24 years old and how she was able to channel the innocence of this young princess who, uh, spirits herself away to experience life as a quote unquote, regular girl. Um, let's take a look at this. Here we go. I also heard you say that you're not self-conscious about your age. So I'm waiting into this. I'm not a good everybody knows that even if I was, um, I was 24 when I did the picture, but a very young 24, because in those days, you know, we, I was really like a 16 year old. I mean, we, I'd had a different life and most kids today and been brought up very strictly and hadn't been in, you know, around the world much. It's remarkable to me, the self-awareness there. Number one, very pointedly, your mother does not get into detail about her childhood. She simply says I had a different one than most people. Number two, she, she says I was more like 16 and, and you're saying, you know, that the war stunted her. Yeah. Not the war, but you know, the, the, the emotional hurt, you know, she, she always used to say that, um, she fought for the rights of the child. And part of those rights are not just the right to, you know, education and food and medical and this and that, but also to affection, to love the right to have a childhood. That was the sacred thing to her, you know, and, and, and that's because the war, the loss of her father, whatever, somehow, you know, robbed her part of that childhood. That is supposed to be a time when you sort of run around and climb trees and, you know, and, and, and you develop this inner voice that then will be with you for the rest of your life. As we seem to be talking more and more about these days, you know, the inner discourse and how important it is, what the nature of that inner discourse is, the quality of what, because everything starts in our mind. There is no reality, you know, the reality is in here, it's not out there. And so how we process and how we create our lives, it's, it starts there and those seeds are so important, which is why she fought so fervently for the rights of the child. Related to was Audrey Hepburn. In Moonstruck, there's a scene where I go from kind of dowdy and I get my hair colored. And that night I come back to my house, but everyone's gone. And I remember walking to the mirror, looking at myself in the mirror, and it reminded me of her somehow. And when I walked to the mirror, I didn't think about her. I met her the night that I won the Academy Award. I got the Academy Award and I went back around the, you know, the curtain and she was standing there and she took my hand and she said, I'm so glad that you won it. I wanted you to win. You know, she was my idol growing up and to be able to win the Academy Award and then have your idol tell you she was so glad that you won it was, you know, I never kind of did hit the ground that night. It's a wonderful story. It's sort of a Cinderella story with a twist, but I think she's so lovely in it and it's such a beautifully made film that, I mean, I can't think of anything better to say than that it's her and a story and everybody loves it. I think probably one of the favorite moments is that iconic opening shot, which is so beautiful. There's a wonderful close-up of Audrey when she says, how do I look? And it's just divine. It was an early film for Blake and he hadn't done that many and this was probably a very, very important turning point in his career. I think that Truman Capote's book was probably a lot darker and I think they originally, I wasn't aware of how controversial it was, but I think there was talk about Marilyn Monroe doing it and so on and so forth, but whatever it was, it is what it is now and look how we're all loving it and remembering it. Well, she asked for Hubert Givenchy to design her wardrobe and I think that speaks for itself. I mean, it's so beautiful, the way she looks, the way she's dressed. I think everybody kind of sat up and took notice after this movie. I was on Broadway performing and on my day off, I went to see Breakfast at Tiffany's and wept and fell in love with it and subsequently went back twice to see it again, never dreaming that the man who directed it would eventually end up being my husband. Life is wonderful, believe me. The merging of Audrey's talent with Blake's phenomenal visual talent and his ability to film so beautifully, it just, it was a magical blending of two, you know, those two aspects. I did subsequently get to know Audrey quite well because I don't think there was a soul that knew her that didn't love her and my husband adored her too and I think, I think I can honestly say if I hadn't come into his life, she might have been my competition. It was one of his early films, it catapulted him to some kind of really important status and every sign that is Blake, everything that Blake, I knew about Blake and his masterful work later on is evident in this film and you should see some of the phenomenal, huge, long scenes where the camera literally doesn't, he doesn't cut, the camera goes on and catches everything. The wonderful party sequence is, was Blake's idea and he cast all his friends and relations and I knew a lot of them too, so it's fun to watch the party sequence and know who's up there. How did she come to tell me that you should play the part? It wasn't Catherine, it was Audrey. What was the question? Can you tell us more about how, how that incident came about? You said that she, she mentioned to you that you should play the part. Well, we became very close on Children's and I knew her arts and she, and I knew that she knew mine. She taught me how to dress, so, and I taught her how to cut, so it was an interesting, clear exchange, you see, to me. Anyway, at the end of our working relationship, she mentioned Coco. She knew all the fashion designers, of course, in France and I think Coco was one of her favorites. I had been to a Coco exhibition when I was maybe 25. I can barely remember back that far, but I was there and someone showed me a picture of me at one of the exhibitions and I think I met Coco, I can't be sure, so I must not have, because if I had met her, it wouldn't have registered, but I told Audrey about it and she mentioned how Coco had liberated women from the food court basically to the streets and that she had helped women understand that they needed to dress more freely and with more movement and a more sense of basically ambition because of how she was and she grew up in an orphanage so she never wanted to be poor again and she had a real sense of how to make money and how to be successful and she would do anything to do that. I don't know, I liked, Audrey was one of my favorite people in the world and whatever she told me to do, I would do. Hi, my name is Emma Ferrer. I'm Audrey Hepburn's granddaughter and I'm really happy to be announcing this Summer Under the Stars for you that's featuring my grandmother Audrey Hepburn. So I wanted to run through a few of these films that you're going to be watching. A lot of them are my personal favorites and also those of my father. To start out, Wait Until Dark, this is I think one of the most pivotal moments in Audrey's career because I think it really shows the shift in an actress that she became and an artist especially in the preparation that she made for the movie. She actually went and and studied, you know, living next to blind people for six weeks and looking how they interacted with the world and how they chose their clothes which which even then went on and informed the the wardrobe decisions for the movie and so I think that it's just um it's such an important moment for her as an actress. Roman Holiday, of course, this is one of the most important films in her entire career. She was her first big movie and she got an Academy Award for it. Apparently while they were while they were filming, Gregory Peck called his agent because initially it was featuring Gregory Peck and she and my grandmother was to appear as a supporting role, so not in the headlines, and Gregory Peck called his agent and he said, hey, you have to make sure that that Audrey is put up next to my name in shining lights as they say on this movie because she's gonna kill it and she's gonna get an Academy Award and he said, what are you talking about? And he said, you know, there's no way she's just a star and he foresaw what he foresaw was right. Nun's Story, I wanted to close with this one because I think as as with Wait Until Dark, this was a moment where she really poured herself into the role and prepared for it so dedicatedly. She also went and lived with Franciscan nuns in the Franciscan order before going to shoot this film. She really wanted to understand, you know, how their value systems work and I think that that narrative really plays out interesting on screen. You know, ultimately she chooses, her character chooses to leave the service and, you know, I think that personally she felt close to that decision because she believed that it was really up to, you know, up to the individual to choose how to live their life religiously, spiritually, and she never really went and pushed any ideological views on my father and that's trickled down to me. Just as a closing note, I found it interesting, it stood out to me that The Sacred Monster, as my dad calls it, Breakfast at Tiffany's is not on this list and I think that that's important because there are so many other films that sort of get lost in the repertoire with having one of these, you know, unbelievably larger than life hits and so I think that I really am happy to be presenting this lineup. I think it's a lineup that deserves attention and I really hope that you enjoy this Summer Under the Stars with TCM. Thank you so much for listening and enjoy! Oh my god, I ate so much today, it's terrible! And are you tired of people comparing you to Audrey Hepburn in that haircut or that's, I mean, high, high praise indeed, don't you think? I haven't, I haven't been so compared to it but I'm, oh come on, are you kidding me? Look at this, we have a, we'll do a comparison right here, watch. Well, now that's, there, of course, the only picture of Audrey Hepburn with four foot long hair. Ah! But thank you for that, that makes me blush. Well, you're a lovely woman and thank you. No one can be Saint Audrey but thank you so much. Hi, I'm Tim Zinnaman, Fred Zinnaman's son. The reason that might be relevant to some of you is my father Fred directed Audrey Hepburn in The Nun Story. I first, or actually the only time that I really encountered her was in Rome in 1958. I had just finished my freshman year in college and had flown to Rome to work for the summer in the cutting room on The Nun Story and my father and Audrey had just wrapped principal photography. For some reason, I don't quite remember why, she invited me to dinner which I thought was very nice and so the two of us and her dog, Famous, went to this fantastic restaurant in Piazza Navona called Pasetto's. What struck me most about her was how much she was similar to the person you would see on screen. She had this wonderful dignity about her. She was very regal and yet very warm and down-to-earth. As I had been in this school for a year, I had gotten used to eating nothing but cold pizza for almost every meal so to come to Rome and to have dinner alone with Audrey Hepburn in this fantastic restaurant and have marvelous food was sort of an unbelievable dream. I felt like a minor character in Roman Holiday. The waiters were coming over constantly making a big fuss and her dog, Famous, was given a chair and she ordered him a filet which the waiters brought and with a flourish cut into small bite-sized pieces and put it in front of him at his place. They also tied a napkin around him for some reason and he sat there and looked at the filet for a minute, sniffed it, licked it and then sat back down completely disinterested. My father's working habits, he always wanted his actors to heavily research their roles and he usually would ask them to spend time with whatever group of people they would be portraying, in her case, a nun. So he put her together with nuns in pre-production and she spent an inordinate amount of time researching the role and living with him, I think, from time to time. But he was very pleased not only with her ultimate performance but her work ethic. She had this dignity about her, a grace, and it was a very regal quality and when you looked at her it was just immediately apparent but on top of that she was very approachable and very real and a genuine person. So I think that was a combination that's made her who she was and she's one of the few actors that transcends all generations, who will be remembered forever. Audrey Hepburn is the best of romance in movies in many ways and definitely her mystique and the class and dignity of her huge romantic soul. It speaks powerfully now, every time I've written a female lead or something and start meeting actresses for who's going to play it, it's always, not unlike Shirley MacLaine, it's always a conversation about Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine that gets us going in terms of where we're going to be when we make our movie and they're kind of the twin pillars of great romantic leads. And Audrey Hepburn, in a movie like Roman Holiday, can give you that moment where she, you know her so well, you know the front that she's holding up and you know the cover she has and beneath it, beneath that dignity and class is like an ocean of longing and an ocean of appreciation for love. And it's the greatest place to start when you're making a movie today, talking about moments like that.