Woke up this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. This happens occasionally and normally I play on my phone, online, or try to exercise earlier. What I try NOT to do – and what I went for this particular morning – is to flip on the tv. HBO was still on from whatever I was watching last – I think a nice little movie called Labor Day. and what I found was something I couldn’t take my eyes off.
How do you even APPROACH a woman like this in a bar?
Audrey Hepburn, looking more smashing than ever, and a very young Peter O’Tool in How to Steal a Million, in what I learned was Hepburn’s last role as the “unmarried young lady” character she specialized in (She would later star in movies like Robin and Marian, and though she wasn’t married in that, it came out 8 years into her retirement from film and she was clearly aging at that point). The great thing about Hepburn is that she got better as the years went on. And this movie I stumbled on is a great example.
Most people think of Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Sabrina (among others), where she was very VERY young. How to Steal a Million was a 37 year-old Audrey Hepburn, as whimsical and doe-eyed as ever, but somehow lightyears sexier than when she was a younger woman.
Some actresses, like Angelina Jolie for example, seem so perfectly fit for movie-stardom that they seem to effortlessly glide from movie to movie, year after year, and don’t seem to age at all. I feel like Hepburn was the original version of that. Her personal charisma and spunk (not to mention – again – those EYES) carried her through her entire career and into more worldly (and more meaningful) work as a UNICEF Ambassador (Another reason Jolie seems to me so similar).
I’m not really going anywhere with this… I don’t imagine it’s a very controvercial position to take, that Audrey Hepburn was a great movie star and very attractive woman. Still, in a world where so few movies stay with me, maybe it’s worth a look back to a time when a different generation of movie stars was in their prime. It’s a troubling time we live in and whether its anachronistic or not, it’s nice to be transported to a place and time when things (complicated as they were then) seemed simpler.
One thing that isn’t so simple is wrapping my head around how and why women like Audrey Hepburn are so few and far between.