It used to be said that you can't be too rich or too thin. We now no longer believe this. Bankers and hedge fund managers are too rich; and now the celebrity magazines and tabloids lead the choruses of "Look how skinny's she's got!" The nicer way of saying the same thing, and making it a compliment, is to call the person elegant.
Audrey Hepburn came to be synonymous with this form of elegance. Even in her early films, her height, her skinniness and her wistfulness combined to get her noticed. In the unhelpful role of Chiquita in The Lavender Hill Mob, she attracts the attention both of Alec Guinness and of the camera: a woman visually striking and possessed of a certain quality of unhappiness.
Being slight and vulnerable, Hepburn could have made a career as one of cinema's perpetual victims – a leading lady for Alfred Hitchcock, maybe. But she was too thoughtful, and too smart in her choice of roles, to let that happen.
Somehow, you can see it all in her childhood and adolescence. Hepburn's parents were an English banker and a Dutch baroness. Both were fascists, who split up before the second world war began. Her mother took her from their home in Belgium to the Netherlands,seeking to avoid the fighting. Holland was promptly occupied by the Germans. Having been schooled in England, half-British and fluent in English, Audrey had to adopt a Dutch persona – Edda van Heemstra – for the duration of the war. We cannot blame the girl for becoming an actor, then – it was forced on her.
Another thing that was forced on her – along with the rest of the kids and most of the adults in Holland – was a lousy diet. In the latter part of the war, food supplies ran out and, like many others, Hepburn suffered from malnutrition, which led to acute anaemia and respiratory problems.
Such was the price of elegance. And yet the story of Audrey Hepburn's early life really does have a legendary, movie-like quality. One of her brothers was a prisoner in a Nazi labour camp. As children, starving, they watched railway wagons go by, full of children, also starving. Audrey, still a teenager, danced to raise money for the Dutch resistance. These things created a strong character, something many actors never get around to acquiring. And it paid off when, shooting a small role in another movie, she was offered the lead role in the stage musical of Colette's Gigi.
Leading roles in Hollywood pictures followed, and Hepburn was romantically linked to various leading lights: the usual story. Where she differed in her trajectory from the starlets who had gone before, perhaps, was in her conscious decision to become a fashionista. The designer Hubert de Givenchy became a close friend and advised her on her wardrobe. Eventually the pair became business partners.
The association of actors or singers with a brand seems old-hat now: the kind of product placement that Lady Gaga might parody or Bono personify. If you want someone to blame for those glossy ads of Mr and Mrs Bono getting out of their safari plane with their designer luggage, the blame must ultimately fall on the fair shoulders of La Hepburn and Givenchy, who called her his muse.
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