Category: Interviews

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

When Audrey Hepburn appeared in Roman Holiday, her first starring role, a British critic wrote “So flowers, please, for the enchanting Audrey – for the girl that has shown that real stars can be found.” Soon after Billy Wilder compared her to another Hepburn (Katherine) and Garbo when he cast her in Sabrina: “It’s the kind of thing where the director plans sixteen close-ups throughout the picture with that dame – that curious, ugly face of that dame.”

It’s hard to think that the ethereal Hepburn, who died in 1993 at the age of 64, would ever be considered ugly. She had a delicate beauty that glowed on the screen; but she was unusual for her time: waifish in the age of more buxom stars as Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe; childlike, with a sing-songy voice and a dancer’s frame; add to that an elegance that led her to be considered one of the last stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age. She could bewitch audiences playing a princess on the lam (Roman Holiday,) or move them as a nun questioning her devotion (The Nun’s Story.) She could turn schlock (Wait Until Dark) into a memorable character study of a blind woman under siege; or simply enchant as the Cockney girl who becomes a lady in the ultimate musical fairy tale (My Fair Lady.) And when Hollywood tired of her, she devoted herself to public service.

It was that star quality that attracted poet Joseph Campana to devote a book of poems to her. She acts as his muse in his recently published The Book of Faces (Graywolf Press.) “There is obsession and then there is Obsession,” wrote the critic from Publishers Weekly reviewing the book. “Taking the thematic poetry collection to its extreme, Campana’s debut approaches Audrey Hepburn from every possible angle. She is paramour, foil, touchstone, teacher, queen and, ultimately, a way to talk about the act of making a self (and a poem)”.

Catching up with Campana on a recent Sunday night, he explained how he came to choose Hepburn as his muse.

“Sometimes you choose a subject, and sometimes it chooses you. I guess she just chose me. … I’ve always loved classic cinema and I had been interested in her for quite some time. I don’t quite know why I started writing poems about her. But it was her combination of elegance and reticence I suppose that interested me.”

Campana, who teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at Kenyon College in Ohio, has had his poetry published in such journals as Poetry, Colorado Review, and New England Review. The Book of Faces is his first book of poetry, and has sold extremely well for the genre thus far. He will be reading from his volume this Sunday at the Harvard Advocate Reading Series at 4:00 pm at 21 South Street, Cambridge, MA.

His relationship with Hepburn began nearly by accident: as a teenager he was home from school on a snow day and caught Charade, the suspenseful Stanley Donen romantic comedy in which she co-starred with Cary Grant.

“It was before I even really knew who she was. Charade really has everything: it’s funny, suspenseful, elegant. It’s set in Paris and we see Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy and Cary Grant in a towel. What could be better?”

It wasn’t the movies, though, that was his first love: rather it was literature, which he discovered while growing up in a small, economically-depressed mill town in upstate New York in the late 1980s – Richard Russo country, where reading, and poetry, acted as an escape from this blue collar world.

“From a very young age. I started with children’s books and graduated to mythology. From there (came interest in) various kinds of literature. In high school, where I had extraordinary teachers, one in particular got me interested in poetry. I always knew I wanted to be a writer of some kind. … My whole family read voraciously–spy novels, romance novels, science fiction. Movies came later. More so in college, I think.”

With this fascination with the movies, came his interest in Hepburn. While in college and graduate school Campana began actively seeing as many of her films as he could: From her more famous roles (The Nun’s Story, My Fair Lady, Breakfast at Tiffany’s) to some less memorable, such as John Huston’s 1960 western The Unforgiven.

“She plays a Great Plains girl who discovers she’s Native American. … She even shoots a gun, kills some Native Americans in it. Shockingly bad in so many ways.”

He is even a fan of one of her later, and less regarded films, Robin and Marion, where she played an aging Maid Marion to Sean Connery’s Robin Hood. (Released in 1976, it was one of her last major starring roles.)

“It was an extraordinary film! She co-starred with Connery (too old to play James Bond at this point) who plays middle-aged Robin Hood. She was Maid Marion. It’s all about exhaustion, about being too old for the same old games. Maybe that’s a way of thinking of the death of an icon. Besides, Hepburn passed into the world of public service after that film.” (In 1988 she took a full-time volunteer position with UNICEF, and spent the rest of her life performing charity work in countries from Ethiopia to Ecuador.)

Campana’s favorite film, though, remains Charade.

“It’s a great film–funny, mysterious, scary. There’s an incredible scene in the film in a nightclub. The master of ceremonies tells the guests that they’re the entertainment. So they play the game where you pass an orange to someone without using your hands. When Audrey Hepburn and Carey Grant do this you think, “Do I want to be Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, or the orange in between?” Maybe that’s the source of my book…”

In preparing his poems, Campana didn’t immerse himself too heavily into the events in her life; rather saw Hepburn more as an icon, much in the same way that earlier poets related to their muses, from “statues of ancient goddesses and gods to the beautiful women and men of Renaissance sonnets.”

“I read a few biographies. I even read a really deranged account by someone convinced was Audrey Hepburn’s long lost son. So some biography enters the book, but I was investigating her as an icon, so I didn’t want to be overburdened with the responsibility of getting at the real Audrey Hepburn. I of course never knew her and my responsibility as a poet is different.”

Why the title, The Book of Faces?

“It emerged as a phrase in one of the poems, but that and the title poem came much later. Faces are interesting, of course–beautiful, strange, deranged–and whenever we think about the act of loving someone or even addressing another person we think about faces or what it means to face someone. … I guess the poems themselves are a series of individual faces, each (hopefully) with a different expression or shape or interest; but all sharing the same basic archetype.”

In the book Campana uses a wide-variety of poetic forms: canzone, sonnets, lists, dramatic monologues, even a graphic poem where the words form Hepburn’s initials, in his exploration of idolatry. Was this eclecticism intentional?

“In this case, absolutely. The danger of having one central concern or subject is, of course, staleness. Having a relationship to an icon is complicated–you look at it, dream, fantasize, it seems to look back at you. So The Book of Faces needed that range of shapes. When we love things, however real or unreal, we’re twisted into all sorts of shapes and flooded with more voices that we can handle. … Of course, I didn’t plan that out in advance. It was just the way the poems were happening. In general, I think as writers we need to really plumb the depths of language and try as many things as we can.”

In writing about Hepburn, he also tells a great deal about himself. Does he feel that poetry is the most exposed of writing genres?

“In a way, I suppose it is, if we understand poetry as being of the most imaginative of the modes of writing we have. Sometimes, it takes acts of real imagination to get at what is most vulnerable and compromising about the private and public lives we live.”

And, lastly, does Campana feel that there are any stars today who are Hepburn’s equal?

“I think there are actresses as great as Audrey Hepburn, yes. At the same time, the culture of celebrity has changed quite a lot. I mean, reality TV stars are celebrity now, and the actors and actresses most hounded by paparazzi aren’t necessarily the great talents. The popularity of today’s stars makes the phenomenon different, I guess.”

Learn more about Joseph Campana’s Book of Faces.

From: EDGE Publications, Article by Robert Nesti, EDGE National Arts & Entertainment Editor, Friday, Feb 24, 2006