That changed in the early ’50s when Audrey Hepburn hit both Broadway and filmdom with a velvet one-two.

The subject of Donald Spoto’s new book “Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn” had been born the daughter of a baroness in Belgium in 1929, grew up in Nazi-infested Holland and became a model and actress in England.

After appearing in roles, often small, in half a dozen British films, Audrey suddenly became, according to Spoto, “perhaps the first inexperienced actor in history to be contracted simultaneously for leading roles on Broadway and in film.”

In late ‘51, Hepburn began starring on Broadway in the title role of “Gigi,” a play based on Collette’s novella about a young French courtesan. (A French film version had opened in 1948.)

At the same time, Hepburn had been signed, by Paramount, for her first American film, 1953’s “Roman Holiday,” in which she plays a princess who escapes from the claustrophobia of royal life for an impromptu vacation in Rome with an American journalist, played by Gregory Peck.

For her director, Hepburn was fortunate to draw William Wyler, who could direct a turnip to an Oscar. Before Wyler’s death in 1981, 14 actors who had starred in his films had won Academy Awards, a record not likely to be broken.

Among those 14 was Audrey Hepburn, who enchanted her way to a best-actress statuette for “Roman Holiday.” Among the actresses she beat out was Leslie Caron, nominated for “Lili,” which co-starred Mel Ferrer, whom Hepburn would marry in 1954. Caron would go on to star in 1958’s “Gigi,” a musical version of the Broadway play that had starred Hepburn.

What 1989 Steven Spielberg film was Audrey Hepburn’s last feature?

Huckleberry sound

“One thing’s for sure, that &#@!* song’s gotto go.”

As quoted in Donald Spoto’s “Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn,” that was the reaction of Paramount executive Martin Rankin upon seeing a preview of the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

The song was “Moon River,” introduced by Hepburn herself in the film, and the only place it went was into Hollywood history. Hepburn saw to that herself. After Rankin made his comment, she insisted the song stay. And it stayed. Not only stayed, but won a 1961 Oscar for composer Henry Mancini and lyricist Johnny Mercer.

Mancini, who also composed the film’s score, had tailored “Moon River” to Hepburn’s limited range. Nonetheless, it’s a lovely, lilting song. To perform it, as her character Holly Golightly, Hepburn took voice and guitar lessons. Hundreds of versions of “Moon River” would follow, but Mancini treasured Hepburn’s simple reading above all others.

So did Tiffany’s, the famous jewelerie. Upon Hepburn’s death, the store devoted a full-page ad to the actress, calling her a “Huckleberry friend,” a reference to Mercer’s famous line from “Moon River.”

Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer won a second straight best-song Oscar for the title song of what 1962 film starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick?

Moon glow

Audrey Hepburn introduced “Moon River” in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” while Henry Mancini and Jerry Butler hit the Top 40 with their respective recordings. But the most famous version of the song came about with a big help from television. After being chosen to sing “Moon River” at the 1962 Oscar ceremonies (honoring 1961 films), Andy Williams adopted the song as the theme of his long-running variety series.

In 1958 and ‘59, Williams had become popular enough as a balladeer — he’d scored a No. 1 with 1957’s “Butterfly” — to host several variety programs on ABC and CBS. Then in 1962, NBC handed him the weekly “The Andy Williams Show,” which continued, in one form or another, into 1971.

Along the way, the show featured as regulars the folky New Christy Minstrels; the toothy, chirpy Osmond Brothers; singer-songwriter Ray Stevens; comics Charlie Callas and Irwin Corey, and various orchestras and dance troupes.

Though never rated in the Nielsen year-end Top 30, the show won three Emmys as best variety series and never had any trouble attracting guests from all walks of entertainment. In 1976, Williams revived the show in syndication.

2. After winning a best-song Oscar for 1961’s “Moon River,” Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer repeated with 1962’s “Days of Wine and Roses.”

Perhaps the celebration of Hepburn’s life came in her work as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF when she traveled through the Far East and Africa on a crusade for refugee children orphaned and crippled by war. Her work was ultimately halted by the onset of cancer.

She voiced her own epitaph in characteristically deprecating terms at an awards ceremony two years before her death when she said, “I think it’s quite wonderful that this skinny broad could be turned into a marketable commodity.”

The Washington Times, reviewed by Muriel Dobbin, September 17, 2006

If Katharine Hepburn and Audrey Hepburn ever met, the encounter has gone unrecorded in two new biographies of the namesake stars, who probably had less in common than Joan Crawford and Broderick Crawford. Cecil Beaton, who dressed them both, found the older Hepburn to be “the egomaniac of all time,” whereas the younger one possessed, he thought, a “waifish, poignant sympathy.” Beaton was better equipped temperamentally to spot the first type, but readers of William J. Mann’s “Kate” and Donald Spoto’s “Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn” will be hard pressed to argue with the essence of the designer’s appraisals.

Mann’s Hepburn sustains her nearly 70-year career from a consuming ambition to become and stay famous, what she herself called a “wild desire to be absolutely fascinating.” She liked the camera even more than it liked her, and despite her projection of flinty integrity and Yankee good sense, she chased notoriety as avidly as any shopgirl who ever stepped onto a bus for Hollywood. Mann concedes Hepburn a certain genuineness of feeling toward Howard Hughes in the late 1930’s, but keeps us mindful that “relationships between public figures are rarely spontaneous combustions.” The press could be counted on to flock to an aviator who had an actress in the cockpit, and so she flew.

Mann contends that Hepburn didn’t really become an actress until she was past 50, when a drive “toward artistic recognition” temporarily replaced the hunger for notice pure and simple. The new, nobler spur sent her off to tour Australia in stage productions of Shakespeare and made her perform searingly in the film adaptations of “Suddenly Last Summer” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.” But after back-to-back Oscars for “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “The Lion in Winter,” and throughout the old age that followed, her thirst for attention regained sway, making sure she was fussed over and fluffed by a series of strategically chosen interviewers.

Hepburn reached Hollywood in 1932, via Connecticut and Bryn Mawr, and once she was there, the director George Cukor made her over and the agent Leland Hayward got her big money. But her pictures and personality played better in the cities than the sticks, and after a big success with “Little Women” she took a hard, fast dive. At RKO, she went from one flop to another and endured a Broadway humiliation (“The Lake”) for good measure. Her best film performance from the 1930’s may have come with “Alice Adams,” in which Hepburn’s desperate, please-notice-me gestures actually fit the valiantly pretentious heroine of Booth Tarkington’s book.

The playwright Philip Barry turned things around for her, but he got his marching orders from Hepburn herself, who shrewdly told him what to do with the character he was writing for her in “The Philadelphia Story”: “Make her like me, but make her go all soft.” Transferred to the movies (Hughes bought her the film rights), the property “defrosted” Hepburn, as Mann puts it, letting her look merely formidable instead of overweening. Having left RKO in 1938, she arrived at MGM ready to be “a classical movie star” at last.

Mann is less interested in Hepburn’s career than in the private arc she traveled alongside it, insisting, reasonably enough, that it is “time to take off the blinders” to the large portions of her emotional existence that were organized around relationships with women. “I put on pants 50 years ago and declared a sort of middle road,” Hepburn explained in 1981, with more candor than was typical of her. Mann does the best he can with the complicated sexual algebra: “She was, in her soul, neither woman nor man, though it was men — straight men — with whom she identified. … But it was only with women that she could set Jimmy free and be herself” — Jimmy being the short-haired boy she’d renamed herself around the time she was 10.

Growing up, Hepburn had made the acquaintance of her mother’s lesbian college friends, formidable “aunts” who were active in politics and the arts in the Greenwich Village of World War I and the 1920’s. Kate’s own serious female romances, including one with the heiress Laura Harding, were clearly central to her life, but they can be a source of biographical frustration. When trying to decide what happened on both sides of Hepburn’s “middle” road, Mann frequently falls into a hedge: “Yet how intimate were they?”; “Yet there’s no evidence”; “Was there a kiss?” Still, inconclusiveness in these matters is smarter than certainty, and Mann manages to be convincing when it comes to patterns if not particulars.

Hepburn tended to follow any serious breakup with a male (the poet H. Phelps Putnam, Howard Hughes and even, for a period, Spencer Tracy) “by retreating to the comforting embrace of a community of women.” Her physical appetites seem to have been decidedly low; in terms of emotion, she was homosexually a taker but heterosexually a giver. If she was attracted to a male type, it was someone in bad need of enabling and cleaning up after. This symbol of female independence generally went for men who were alcoholic, womanizing, married or bisexual. (Mann has Hughes, John Ford and even Tracy weaving all over that sexual road.) The son of the producer David O. Selznick once explained why Hepburn’s relationship with Hayward never got very far: “Leland just wasn’t tortured enough for her.”

Tracy, her great on-screen collaborator, had personal misery to spare: his drinking; the deafness of his son; a guilty separation from his wife; a pessimism so complete he believed himself headed, literally, to hell. Hepburn never asked him to stop drinking, worried perhaps that his sobriety might parch the dependency in which they swam. Their private world seems to have contained little of the sexually energized sparring of their films, and probably no more kissing than they did on-screen, which wasn’t much. Despite a general assumption about the length and steadiness of their companionship, Hepburn did leave Tracy for a large part of the 1950’s, but returned to devote herself to him with extraordinary vigor during the years leading up to his death in 1967. During her peculiar sort of widowhood, which lasted more than 30 years, she began publicly to romanticize a relationship whose limitations had derived less from the pressures of circumstance than the deliberate wariness of its participants.

Mann didn’t wait for Hepburn’s papers to become available before writing his book, but he seems to have been unusually enterprising in obtaining materials and interviews from some of the star’s less-famous surviving intimates. Reconstructing Hepburn as a kind of fragile monster, he explains things in a voice that can be stern and fussy (he relishes correcting past biographers’ mistakes) and on occasion so solemn as to seem comical: “That the sophisticated circle surrounding Cukor was largely gay cannot be denied.”

It’s interesting to note that Hepburn never became a blazing gay reference point in the manner of other full-throttle female stars of the 30’s and 40’s like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. What may have kept generations of homosexual men from taking her into their hearts was their sense that Hepburn, even “defrosted,” could always so manifestly do without the man on-screen. They never sensed this while watching Davis and Crawford, not even when those stars were at their most ferocious, and they never felt it about themselves.

It was also something they never felt when watching the other, later Hepburn, Audrey. Preternaturally pretty instead of striking, and usually more delicate than dramatic on film, she nonetheless nearly ached with the need for male love. Style, too, had something to do with her own still growing gay-iconic status, though in her case the style seems to have been less an ambitious self-creation than something she gratefully allowed to be draped over her, like one of Givenchy’s costumes.

Donald Spoto’s new biography isn’t nearly so ambitious or stimulating as Mann’s — it’s mostly a competent clip job — but the real contrast between “Enchantment” and “Kate” lies in the emotional mainsprings of their subjects. If Katharine Hepburn tended to mythologize her parents and her childhood, Audrey Hepburn generally veiled the hurt of her own early life. Misunderstood by her Dutch mother and abandoned by her English father, she nearly starved to death during the Nazi occupation of Holland. She would always remain avid for the chocolate and tobacco that accompanied her rescue by English soldiers in 1945. Milk and medicine arrived with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, whose later incarnation, Unicef, she would repay with years of hard work.

Directors constantly paired her with much older leading men — Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant and Fred Astaire — and in films she always seems to be searching less for romance than paternal protection. She would no doubt have lived her life anywhere with conspicuously good manners; that she lived it so in the movie business makes her even more appealing. “Enchantment” is devoid of feuds and fits of temperament. Hepburn always displayed modesty about her acting abilities, which in fact grew to be considerable. She may have been risibly ill cast in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (Truman Capote had wanted Marilyn Monroe), but who can deny that her screen Holly Golightly is more memorable than the book’s? Despite her general cooperativeness, Hepburn always refused to pad her flat chest, a decision that seems even wiser when one considers the soulless result of allowing her lovely, plaintive voice to be dubbed by Marni Nixon’s in “My Fair Lady.”

Compared with Katharine Hepburn’s epic film career, her own — if one doesn’t count the few, mostly bad movies she made during fitful re-emergences from a premature retirement — was quite brief, just about 15 years. But its ratio of hits to misses, of films worth doing (“The Nun’s Story,” “Two for the Road”) to projects better left unmade (“How to Steal a Million”) was probably higher than the other Hepburn’s. She wanted far less from the movies and something far simpler from life; certainly she had no “wild desire to be absolutely fascinating.” She married unwisely, twice, the first time to the actor Mel Ferrer, who thought they could become the Lunts, but who, more typically, wound up being cast as Prince Andrei since that’s how they could get his wife for Natasha, in “War and Peace.” Audrey Hepburn’s sexual drive seems to have been far heartier than Katharine Hepburn’s — more like her exact contemporary Grace Kelly’s — but love affairs with William Holden and Ben Gazzara only accentuated the sadness beneath her charm.

Spoto does a far less successful job of inhabiting his Hepburn than Mann manages with his, but “Enchantment” makes palpable the degree to which Audrey Hepburn was possessed by an urgent and unsettling need to give love — stronger even than the urge to receive it. Perhaps this was the ultimate form of her good manners. Whatever the case, the condition drove her in a more elemental way than Katharine Hepburn’s need to ride to the rescue of all those damaged men. Toward the close of her life, she found a happy companionship with Robert Wolders, a Dutch former actor who accompanied her on her trips for Unicef; she spent more effort promoting the agency’s projects than she’d spent publicizing her films. Of the two Hepburns, she was the one who remained undevoured by her own persona, the one marked out for a sadder life but a better last reel.

Learn more about Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn.

From: New York Times, Article by Thomas Mallon, October 8, 2006

”YOU cannot duplicate her or take her out of her era,” the filmmaker Billy Wilder said of Audrey Hepburn, whom he directed in 1953 in ”Sabrina,” when she was a 24-year-old ingénue. Oh can’t you? Turn on the television today, and you’ll see her in Gap ads, clad in a black turtleneck and pants, her body as slender as a parenthesis, rocking out to the AC/DC metal ballad ”Back in Black.”

She is not only duplicated, she’s quadruplicated — cloned and pasted in digital homage to the eternal sublime. On YouTube.com, where copies of the commercial have been posted, one awed viewer wrote: ”Not many of the younger people know who she is. Now everyone will know her.”

It may be tempting to think that Ms. Hepburn never boogied down in quite that way. But watch her 1957 movie ”Funny Face,” and you’ll see her make those very moves, dancing in a smoky Parisian cafe to a jazz-hot Gershwin score. Then, as now, she embodied a fragile but proud feminine fierceness; then, she used her influence to advance the career of her beloved couturier, Hubert de Givenchy. Now her élan is being used to hawk Gap’s ‘’skinny black pant.”

Ms. Hepburn’s newest biographer, Donald Spoto, the author of a dozen celebrity biographies, doesn’t see the current commercial homage as a comedown. Her ”vulnerability and vivacity” endure, he told ”Good Morning America” last weekend. In ”Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn,” an intimate, respectful and nuanced portrait of this avatar of glamour, he reveals her human frailties and remarkable strength of character.

Ms. Hepburn was never the girl next door. The daughter of a chilly Dutch baroness and a Bohemian-born absent father, she grew up in Belgium, England and the Netherlands. During World War II, she danced to earn money for the Dutch resistance, until near-starvation made such exertion impossible. At war’s end, she was 16 years old and 5-foot-7, and weighed 90 pounds. Two years later and 20 pounds heavier, she was performing on the London stage, and in 1951, she was chosen to star in ”Gigi” on Broadway and in the movie ”Roman Holiday,” for which she won the Academy Award for best actress.

Ms. Hepburn played unattainable women in her movies: a princess on the run (”Roman Holiday”), a party girl with a hidden heart (”Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), a nun tormented by doubt (”The Nun’s Story”). But in person she was ”considerate and unpretentious” and ”could also be a clown,” Mr. Spoto writes.

She did not consider herself beautiful, nor did she think she was much of an actress. In the words of one of her sons, Sean Ferrer, she was ”a very insecure person whose very insecurity made everyone fall in love with her.” She was, he said, ”a star who couldn’t see her own light.”

LIKE Audrey Hepburn, James Stewart had a personality and a manner of speech that couldn’t be separated from the characters he played, and like her, he doubted his ability and his looks, and feared that his parents didn’t respect his work. Unlike Ms. Hepburn, Mr. Stewart lacked any whiff of European mystery, and his manner of speech was an earnest middle-American drawl. He was a man of the people — the American people.

And yet, as Marc Eliot shows in his gossipy, somewhat excessively thorough overview, ”Jimmy Stewart: A Biography,” although the shy star acted in 80 movies over seven decades, directed by Frank Capra, George Cukor, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and others, his confidence in his career and his personal life was often shaky.

A late bloomer, he had to be coaxed by his friend and roommate Henry Fonda in the 1930’s to tangle the sheets with Ginger Rogers. Mr. Stewart was coursed like a hare by strong-willed screen sirens who found his gentle demeanor inflaming: Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn. He found their aggression alarming.

It took a Croix de Guerre, which he received in 1945 for flying combat missions over Germany, to make his father think he was a man; it took marriage, in 1949 at age 41, to end his romantic trials; and it took the small-screen resurrection of a 1946 box office disappointment called ”It’s a Wonderful Life” to shore up his confidence about his legacy as a performer. Broadcast on a New York station in 1969, it quickly became a holiday staple across the nation. Christmas after Christmas, the struggles of the embattled family man George Bailey secured his legend.

Dustin Hoffman, one of the tardy viewers of the film, said to Mr. Stewart, ”You made me laugh, you made me cry, and you made me wish for a country which perhaps we haven’t seen for a while.” Mr. Capra, who directed Mr. Stewart in that movie (and in ”Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and ”You Can’t Take It With You”), explained that he ”grabbed you as a human being.”

”You were looking at the man, not an actor,” Mr. Capra said.

As George Bailey’s guardian angel put it: ”It’s a good face. I like it.”

Learn more about Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn by Donald Spoto and Jimmy Stewart: A Biography by Marc Eliot.

From: New York Times, Article by Liesl Schillinger, October 1, 2006

Hollywood legend Audrey Hepburn is back in vogue as a style icon more than 13 years after her death — but a biographer fears the revival will feed a misconceived image of the actress, who never cared much about fashion.

Hepburn, who is often named as one of the most beautiful women of all time, is inspiring the new season’s fashion line-up with her classic but simple style of skinny black pants, flat pumps and little, black dresses.

Retailer Gap is leading the drive, using pictures of the actress in skinny black pants on billboards and in a television and Web ad, dancing in the 1957 movie “Funny Face” set to rock band AC/DC’s song “Back in Black.”

Another U.S. retailer J. Crew has set up a Little Black Dress Shop in its stores.

Author Donald Spoto, who this week released a new biography on the Oscar-winning actress called “Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn,” said he is not surprised by the renewed focus on Hepburn.

“Audrey Hepburn represents a kind of elegance that may be especially appreciated in an era of torn jeans. Her combination of modesty and simplicity are a wonderful corrective in these times of vulgar and empty celebrity,” he told Reuters.

But he said he felt this emphasis on fashion and style minimized Hepburn’s significant achievements as an actress. Later in life Hepburn was very active in humanitarian work.

“(It) also directly contradicts her own sense of values, which did not place clothes very highly on a list of important things,” he said.

Hepburn, who died of colon cancer in 1993 aged 63, always played down her own beauty, saying her look was attainable.

“Women can look like Audrey Hepburn by flipping out their hair, buying the large sunglasses, and the little sleeveless dresses,” she once said.

But her classic style has endured and remained in demand. The black Givenchy dress she wore in the 1961 movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” is expected to sell at an auction in December for around $100,000.

Spoto said he wrote about Hepburn because he was disappointed in previous works on her, with the actress treated as a “stained glass window figure” rather than a human being who struggled.

His book reveals Hepburn desperately wanted children but had bad luck with famous boyfriends who were sterile.

She did finally have a son, Sean, with American actor Mel Ferrer in 1960. Sean Ferrer allowed Gap to use his mother in their campaign with a significant donation to be made to the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund. She had another son in 1970 with second husband, Italian psychologist Andrea Doretti.

“The most surprising thing was the constant thread of heartache and disappointment in her life, which she bore with magnificent grace and courage,” said Spoto.

Learn more about Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn.

From: Reuters, Article by Belinda Goldsmith, Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Fifty years ago, she was the toast of Hollywood and a style icon. And more than 10 years after her death, Audrey Hepburn is still setting trends.

From big sunglasses to her ubiquitous skinny black pants, Hepburn’s look is back.

Donald Spoto talks about the so-called “Audrey effect” in his new biography, “Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn.”

Spoto says the starlet’s combination of vulnerability and vivacity makes her so enduring. New audiences have been exposed to Hepburn’s glamour thanks to Gap ads featuring her dance from the movie “Funny Face” — reset to the AC/DC song “Back in Black.”

According to Spoto, “Funny Face” was a turning point in Hepburn’s career.

“She realized in that film what had been her ambition as a child and teenager, which was to be a ballet dancer,” Spoto said.

Sadly, because of malnutrition and illness she suffered during World War II, she wasn’t able to realize her dream.

As fans of Hepburn know, she nevertheless went on to have a fulfilling career, all the while turning heads with her signature looks. In an interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters, Hepburn said her style was attainable to everyone.

“They can look like Audrey Hepburn if they want to by cutting off their hair, by buying the large glasses, by having the little sleeveless dresses,” she said.

Spoto said Hepburn created a name and look for herself by standing out in the crowd of 1950s starlets.

“In the ’50s, of course … it was the era of kind of opulent sexuality,” he said. “It was Marilyn Monroe and Jane Mansfield. Along came Audrey Hepburn, who was just enough different to appeal to both men and women.”

Humanitarian and Style Icon

Late in life, Hepburn devoted herself to humanitarian work — long before stars like Brad Pitt and Angelia Jolie made it popular.

“We have to give Audrey Hepburn high marks for spending the last six years of her life going into dangerous situations worldwide to try to help starving children in war-torn countries with no thought of her own safety,” Spoto said.

“She went and did something for the world. She made a difference. She made the world a better place.”

Indeed, decades later, the world is still feeling the “Audrey effect.”

To view a clip of this interview, visit the ABC News webpage.

Learn more about Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn.

From ABC News, September 24, 2006

Celebrity biographer Spoto (The Art of Alfred Hitchcock) offers a sparkling, fawning life of the European gamine whom America took to instantly with her 1953 debut in Roman Holiday. Hepburn (1929-1993) held the irresistible charm of a childlike star naïvely unaware of her appeal, from her first big break at age 22 when selected by Colette herself to play the Broadway version of Gigi. Born to a Dutch baroness and an English ne’er-do-well (and fascist sympathizer) who separated when she was six, Hepburn and her mother underwent horrendous deprivations during the Nazi occupation of Holland during WWII; her early ambition to become a ballet dancer was undermined by inadequate nutrition and training. Her early film successes flowed astonishingly, however, from Sabrina, Funny Face, Love in the Afternoon, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and My Fair Lady to attempts at roles with more gravitas, as in The Nun’s Story and Wait Until Dark. Often paired with older, avuncular leads, Hepburn was viewed as unerotic, yet Spoto tracks her steamy relationships with playboys and co-stars, and marriage to American actor-director Mel Ferrer, who often acted as her Pygmalion. Her later work with UNICEF is sketched too briefly. Spoto’s previous Hollywood biographies allow the author authoritative access to Hepburn.

Learn more about Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn.

From: Publishers Weekly, September 2006.