Actress Files: Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn, Sabrina
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1954 Best Actress Oscar to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl)

Why I Waited: As regular readers will already know, I wasn't much of a convert to Hepburn's cause until recently, and I'm still suspicious of Wilder. Those biases account for some heel-dragging on Sabrina. But really, once I realized that Garland vs. Kelly would be a perfect way to finish this project, the idea of saving a third nominee from the same high-caliber field was impossible to resist.

The Performance: When I began this final tour through the Ghosts of Best Actresses Past with Betty Compson in April, Audrey Hepburn was the only performer with more than one entry outstanding on the list of 41 nominations I then had left to screen. I am so glad I saw The Nun's Story first, since I was so taken with and surprised by her work as Sister Luke that Sabrina became a real event for me to look forward to, and not just a coattail pre-show for the Garland vs. Kelly rematch that I'm about to investigate. Watching in reverse would not have worked in the same way—I was not nearly so bowled over by Sabrina that it would have magnificently whetted my appetite for The Nun's Story. The performances exist at entirely different planes of ambition and accomplishment. Still, in some ways, it's equally impressive to find that, in a single year, Hepburn passed from being an elegant but rather mute icon of demure femininity in Roman Holiday to being the more plausible woman and the cleverer, more gently risk-taking actress that we find in Sabrina. It's not a performance for the annals but it's a noteworthy step in the right direction, and though I haven't seen any of the four movies Hepburn filmed between this one and The Nun's Story (to include War and Peace, Love in the Afternoon, the suspicious Green Mansions, or the promising Funny Face), the prospect of watching her artistic education transpire across that span of work suddenly acquires a genuine appeal. Even if it turns out to be a comparatively fallow run, I will officially be rooting for her.

Now, rest assured that when I say "more plausible woman," I am speaking in matters of degree only. Sabrina Fairchild has a few more dimensions than Princess Ann of Europia (capital: Poise City, pop. 1), but she is nevertheless a denizen of eager Hollywood fantasy, a chauffeur's daughter who lives with her father above the garage of the fabulously wealthy Larrabee family, pining for the less reputable of its two scions, the golden-haired ladies' man David (William Holden). As a reluctant alternative to suicide, once she has realized that David will never in a million years acknowledge her, Sabrina relocates to Paris where she becomes a singularly bad student of cooking. Then she meets a puckish, Edmund Gwenn-y Baron in her class. This gentleman kindly instructs her that if she wants her soufflé to rise, she'll need to turn on her oven... but he also recognizes her peculiar distractedness as a symptom of unrequited love. What a difference a sentimental, potentially patronizing remark from one slumming member of the landed gentry can make! Before we know it, Sabrina has returned to Long Island, so chicly dressed and coiffed that her own father has nearly as much difficulty recognizing her as does David , who nonetheless rises much, much more quickly in response to Sabrina than her soufflés ever did. If you get my drift. And I'm sure you do.

If the movie had been made in France instead of just taking a sojourn there—c'est à dire, in a culinary academy with a direct view of the Eiffel Tower, and in a student's appartement that gives onto Montmartre and Sacre Coeur—we'd have had a fighting chance that Sabrina's return to the Larrabees' lavish estate would occasion a tart but tasty revenge scenario, in which the most comely woman in the world finally snares the eye of a man who never batted a lash at her in 20 years, only to expose his comically rote seduction routine and leave him with no skirt left to chase. During a long outdoor party sequence just after Sabrina's return, she nods with eager approval at every turn in David's Manual of Flirting, even providing him with a few of his own customary prompts, gleaned from years of watching him lure other girls into the private tennis court for the identical menu of champagne and kisses. It's odd that Sabrina so clearly tips her hand, at least to those of us in the audience, that she knows David's enthusiasm for her is wholly generic. Indeed, she is only too willing to be marched through the pre-set choreography. She harbors no ambitions of exploding his overtures from within, and if anything, she seems all too happy to incur the same responses as all those gigglier, blonder, and wealthier girls have done forever. If anyone is scheming, it's David's older, more responsible brother Linus (Humphrey Bogart), already inheriting the lion's share of the family business from their father, and swiftly cognizant that the Larrabees will never allow a marriage between their scintillating son, even if he is an empty-headed ne'er-do-well, and the daughter of the paid help. After David sidelines himself with an injury that could only arise in a Billy Wilder film (I'll leave you to discover it, and the parade of double entendres that surround it), Linus intercedes to escort Sabrina around the town, around the harbor, to the theater, and atop the corporate headquarters. He means to stultify her with the sexless, prosaic facts of his rich industrialist's life and, by extension, to wean her of her affection for David, who besides being so callow is also already engaged.

If I'm allowing more plot summary than I'd normally want to, it's because Sabrina itself stays so oddly fixated on its plot, even though it's so comically, archetypally predetermined that you've predicted the whole thing within 15 minutes. Wilder's direction affords some charm to the platoon of chauffeurs, butlers, maids, and other staff who track Sabrina's early heartbreak and her sublime self-reinvention, with the eccentric spiritedness of a Preston Sturges chorus. And yet, his direction of Sabrina seems no less cowed than his co-authored script when it comes to really engaging the withering, entrenched snobbism of the Larrabees, a pivotal plot element and core thematic axiom from which Wilder nonetheless keeps diverting our attention. He's also weirdly unsuccessful in coaxing Bogart into the tonalities of light romantic banter, or folding him into the prevailing aesthetic of glossy elegance. Rarely, in fact, have I seen a superstar leading man in an erstwhile romantic comedy look so haggard, and so very tentative about the genre. You can put him in a white tuxedo coat but you can't efface the signs of illness or idiomatic mismatch. I was frankly just as spooked by how shrunken and drawn Wilder allows Bogie to look here as I was by any of Montgomery Clift's post-accident apparitions in films like Raintree County, even if Bogie's dwindling follows more of a natural human cycle. Give or take the ocean of whiskey.

Add all that together, and you can see how Hepburn could get trapped playing another alabaster mannequin, alongside a co-star who's clearly the worse for wear and in a film that keeps pussy-footing around its own thematic thrusts. Sabrina is so god-damned gorgeous, you'd think Hal Pereira and Edith Head invented black & white themselves, amidst some lustrous moment of Olympian inspiration, but this, too, could have backfired against the actress, particularly for any audiences hoping to see her transcend the confines of glassy, desexualied, art-directed splendor. Hepburn's immaculate posture actually does allow the sublime visual scheme to work, since an actress of less refinement might have made the glamor of the film seem overbearing, or nakedly compensatory of other flaws. But the real gifts of the performance, proscribed though they are by an undemandingly written role, center around the frankly unnerving presence she brings to her early scenes as David's stalking admirer and the sophisticated lightness with which she floats the main line of the film, shaped around Sabrina's swannishly revised alter ego. Early signals are actually a bit grim in these regards, since Hepburn narrates the opening voice-over with much more insufferable "polish" than it requires. Her affectedly snooty vowels are a bit much even for a character we know is scheduled for a midfilm reinvention, talking about the groundskeepers who "scraype the buttums" of the Larrabees' boats and about their coddled goldfish named "Joje"—not just a different inflection but a phonetic world away from anything one might pronounce as "George." She's got all these Billy Wilder quips and barbs to read, about how David amounts to little more than a $600 deduction on Linus's taxes, and how Linus himself was voted by his fellow Yalies as "Most Likely to Leave His Alma Mater Fifty Million Dollars," but she sounds worryingly incapable of having any fun with them.

It makes for a fun twist, then, that the way Hepburn brings some spirit into the film after this cheeky but oddly flat introduction is not by letting her hair down or unleashing her charms but by being a bit spooky. She hides in dark copses and lurks outside of windows while spying on David, and that's all down to the scenario and the photography, but Hepburn gives Sabrina a kind of Ninotchka solemnity that works as a very dry joke while also fairly capturing the character's adolescent envy and discontent. You know Wilder, the hard-hearted bastard, just loves his suicide jokes, but when Sabrina writes some parting words to her father ("P.S. Don't have David at the funeral. He probably won't even cry"), Hepburn gets a chuckle out of the flawless lines of Sabrina's body. She moves like a prima ballerina even as she's sporting as dour a mask as her face can manage, and looking very miserable indeed, in the manner of a six-year-old who sits all day on the front stoop with a lunch box, threatening to run away forever. This almost alien level of composure might seem like an impregnable fact of being Audrey Hepburn, but she has strategically robotized her pace and her gait and has settled on the perfect, funny-to-everyone-but-Sabrina expression of teenaged fatalism. We can see, through the subtlest of intimations, that she has settled on this hyperbolic equipoise as her best, ironic tactic for triumphing over a looming scene that only Wilder would throw up as a ghoulish obstacle for one of his own comedies, as Sabrina attempts to gas herself with the exhaust of eight running cars. When comedy works, even very dry and wordless comedy, it works. And this works, right down to Hepburn's Héloise et Abelard way of sliding down the wall curving into some kind of daft communion with the inner wall of the garage.

Try this for two hours, though, and an audience would fairly get tired, so I was as relieved as anyone when Marcel Dalio's Baron finally got Sabrina to crack a smile. This smile serves Hepburn wonderfully for most of the rest of the film. A particularly extravagant version of it greets David's unrecognizing response to her at the Long Island depot, suggesting more clearly than the script does that Sabrina is both delighted to enjoy his long dreamed-of attentions and also having an immediate, inward laugh at his obsequious buffoonishness. Sabrina seems to want to be a comedy, sort of, but the focus or intensity of its comic aims are rendered unclear by the fact that not much that's funny actually happens in it. The script gets its share of scrumptious screwball utterances ("All columnists should be beaten to a pulp and converted back into paper!") and some good situational humor, as when Linus, the decent but totally closed-off capitalist, entertains himself at cocktail parties by demonstrating how his latest line of clear plastic squares don't even scorch when you set them on fire. If you're scratching your head, I admit that even this wouldn't be funny if Wilder didn't fold it casually into the background of an elegant shot; this is just what Linus does, while other people gossip or preen or grab for the hors d'oeuvres. In these and other scenes, though, William Holden is a fine but fairly blank pretty-boy flunky as David, and as I've said, Bogart seems a out-of-sorts with his part, maybe even with the whole script. So among the leads, Hepburn is the only one who seems to find the register of winsome, winking pleasantness that Sabrina can reach more easily than it can grasp more recognizable "comedy." She finds ways of chuckling on a sailing date with Linus and of engaging him in fond conversation, especially after-hours in his office, that give Sabrina as well as Sabrina some spontaneity, lightness, and attractive charge. Without denying the utter artificiality of the scenario, the music, and the visual style, she's the person on screen who seems to breathe like a human, and to believe in what her character believes.

I was pleased that, in so believing, she doesn't move to save Sabrina from what the audience, along with the character's father (wonderfully etched by John Williams), might well see as the moral error of being only too happy to be loved by David so long as she's imposed a veneer of swanky cosmopolitanism over her wage-earning origins. A safer actress would steal some looks, nibble her lip, or insert some awkward pauses to let us know that Sabrina is always troubled by the way she's letting herself become the latest in David's line of sexy flings. But Hepburn shows us a woman who's blithely willing to be just that—in full awareness, too, of that fiancée of David's waiting in the wings, and sometimes right in center stage. By the same token, having come deceptively close to Scarlet Woman status, this impossibly lean gamine is not in the ideal position to be shocked or appalled when she eventually finds out that the Larrabees, even the one who seems to love her most, are ready to ship her off, quite literally, so as to avoid the stain of the non-aristocracy. Hepburn has the grace not to seize a flagrant moral authority that isn't really Sabrina's to seize, even though she very smoothly, tacitly, and affectingly shows us how the air gets sucked out of Sabrina's lungs when confronted with a truth that hasn't, frankly, been all that hard to guess.

It's odd to me that I'm expending as many words on Hepburn's classy, sensible, but still slightly green approach to the modest requirements of Sabrina as I did on her grave, shaken, breathtakingly mature work in The Nun's Story. However much they are qualified by the short-cuts in the script, her own simplicities as an actress, and her second-billing in some respects to the fabulousness of what she wears, her successes as Sabrina are not the kind that deepen or improve the movie so much as they allow it to work. Would, though, that all actors had the strong, clear, spring-water gifts that allow a star vehicle to work, gifts that do require some effort and some intelligent parsing, not just beauty and charisma. A film like Sabrina can easily go adrift, implying perpetually that it's meant to orbit some nexus of charm that no one in the audience can actually detect (see: The Moon Is Blue). So, when this sort of movie holds up, even while flirting with nuances and darker sides that it disappointingly refuses to plumb, it's worth poking around to see whose hands have kept it steady and seaworthy. The designers are aces, but the world they create could be swiftly sunk without any intriguing people to inhabit it. Wilder and his co-writers supply most of what's best in Sabrina but are also responsible for that which is most evasive, distasteful, or inadequate. Hepburn betrays little sense of genius or creative autonomy by 1954, especially compared to an undeniable talent like Wilder, but she's a savvy student and vessel for her irascible director, and may even have better intuitions than he does about what the audience wants and what the material needs in a case like this. She isn't yet a fully realized thespian, but she's convincingly cast as someone special, and without chickening away from Wilder's morbid impulses, she warms this cool film considerably. She, more than anyone, turns an uneven, ambivalent lark into a modest but real pleasure.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 2 to Go

Birthday Girls: Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn, The Nun's Story
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1959 Best Actress Oscar to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top)

Why I Waited: Lack of allegiance to Audrey, and to Zinnemann, and to nuns, and to midcentury "values" pictures, especially when they stretch over two hours.

The Performance: First off, if I may enumerate: Audrey Hepburn, Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Patricia Collinge, Mildred Dunnock, Beatrice Straight, and Colleen Dewhurst (as a psychopathic inmate!), all in the same picture. Such a constellation of legendary actressing that whenever Barbara O'Neil apparently passed through, I missed her. Top work, too, by Peter Finch and Dean Jagger, and by actresses previously unknown to me, like Patricia Bosworth, Ruth White, Margaret Phillips, and Dorothy Alison (one "L," and so not the one you're thinking of).

But let's not bury the lead: among the very highest pleasures afforded by this whole exercise, being wowed by performers to whom I was previously indifferent runs a close second to having my expectations surpassed by wizards I already adored. Some fans of Audrey Hepburn maintain that everything she ever touched was perfection, and though I can easily see how the swanlike, elegant, superhumanly gracious woman could inspire that level of fealty, I have never seen how such a case could be made for the actress. Among fans who permit distinctions, though, Hepburn's turns in 1967's Two for the Road and 1959's The Nun's Story far surpass all her others as pledged conversion experiences. I admit, my curiosity about the possible truth of these predictions has been outweighed by my worries about discovering myself the human exception to this cosmic rule. One hates to know for sure that one just doesn't "get" Audrey Hepburn, because the ideal of serene chic, sari'd in peerless and simple humanitarianism, is an epitome to which anyone would want to show favor.

Conversion and belief take unexpected forms, though, as I came to learn for different reasons but nonetheless at the same time as Sister Luke, née Gabriella van der Mal, the Belgian girl who takes orders in a convent at the outset of The Nun's Story, Fred Zinnemann's handsome, high-minded, and surprisingly rich film about Luke's experiences as a woman of the church. Among many smart, principled decisions Robert Anderson makes in his script is his excising of any but the slimmest impressions of who Gabrielle is or what she is like before taking her vows. Starting in the convent might have lessened our sense of what Gabrielle renounces by assuming this formidable challenge to her soul's provenance, her self-perceptions, and, increasingly, her minuscule but torturing "vanity." We'd be denied the flawless tact but the obviously etched regret of her father (Jagger), whispering as though in plaintive warning, "I don't want to be proud of you, I want you to be happy!" We would lose out on witnessing the prim, cool, frankly eerie resolve with which Gabrielle strides into her new life as Luke, and plays her lapses in protocol (sprinting when she's late, speaking when she oughtn't) not as jokes or as exposés of institutional dourness but of lamented errors in a craft, an ethics, that she means very much to honor. Sister Luke craves and sets quite a high bar, and so too does the film, for itself and for its star. The religious life must be articulated and revealed on its own intricate terms, not through opposition to some simplified vision of bouncing secular life, as prologue or parallel plot; Hepburn cannot use some impetuous sketch of green or narrow youth as a foil by which to cultivate new, tactical mannerisms representing faith, tranquility, or submission.

As it happens, none of those capacities comes automatically to Sister Luke, and the prodigious charge of a deceptively placid-looking film comes from the fact that Audrey Hepburn, of all people, has to scour her heart for trace elements of doubt, unrest, and arrogant assertion. But here, too, Hepburn and Zinnemann resist the logic of the foil. The Nun's Story does nothing to conjure the ghost of the Givenchy-clad gamine so that, as in so many other change-of-pace performances across the decades, we tick off our congratulations to the actor who has opposed one avatar of herself with another one, strenuously and self-regardingly constructed. This isn't an officiously revised or a diametrically different Hepburn so much as a firm, latent aspect of Hepburn that no previous role has probed. So often, a premise for a strong performance arrives in a seemingly cosmetic concern. We find such a revelation in the sere, bone-white face that emerges when Hepburn's brow and jaw are framed by the sharp lines of her white wimple. Suddenly, she presents the bare, pallid architecture of the human that the very different contemporary figure of Tilda Swinton has often been used to show us. The face is that of an icon in a religious painting, something remote but troubled, seemingly filtered of blood but not of worry. The mystery, then, is not how Gabrielle has come to lack her interpreter's seemingly innate endowments of poise and rectitude, because we aren't even thinking about her interpreter. The mystery is how her body seems regressed in time and broken down—simply, unhistrionically—into its barest ingredients, and yet this emblem of asceticism still feels the agony of something inward, something designed to provoke unrest, like a splinter that pricks even after it appears fully removed.

Where, in that body and face, could it reside, and what is it? It is her faith, but not solely, and "faith" is the question, anyway, not its answer. In laboratory scenes, it is her scientific acumen, cultivated in part by her famous father, and fueling a drive toward philanthropy that Sister Luke apprehends, both from others and in herself, as a slippery slope into self-aggrandizement. In moral dilemmas, as when she faces down a mutual antipathy with a fellow nun, or when she is asked by one Mother Superior to flunk an exam deliberately and disavow any taste for adulation, Sister Luke worries that her sin lies in pride—in a yen, however modest, for approval. The character several times professes to lapses in "charity, humility, and obedience" that we have a tough time perceiving. Indeed, Hepburn makes the performance more interesting by making Sister Luke so earnest in these claims, without pigeonholing the character as a rote reciter of dogma she cannot really mean, or a dupe of misguided zeal, heedlessly making faults out of virtues. The Nun's Story handles sound, lighting, color, framing, and ensemble playing so carefully that it's easier than you might expect to empathize with this pitiless regimen of self-scrutiny. But no one aids our understanding more than Hepburn, whose eyes never rest as windows into pensive animation, even as she marshals that inborn gift for composure into keeping a firm rein on the clean, stark lines of her movements, her posture, her speech, and her thought. A less ambitious performance might have snuck in little heartbeats of jollity or bloom as Sister Luke connects with what she loves (science, knowledge, succor, good work), so that her moments of self-censure are weighted all along with sentimental cues, with our desire for the character to just let it out, Be Free. Hepburn, without ever being boring, is vigilant and self-policing, on guard even against these blips of offhanded pleasure, and only as warm as the lowest gleam of the coal (but never cold). Her vigilance, her inward quest, the stillness and often the solemnity of her face are spiritualized in ways that cinema only achieves when it restrains rather than heightens its allowance of conspicuous emotion. For that reason it's a miracle when you see a portrait of complex thought but also of banked or repressed feeling in as pathos-hungry an aesthetic as that of Hollywood.

Hepburn doesn't withhold from playing the local pressures and demands of specific scenes. She is hit hard, however mutely, at seeing her first sanitarium and her first leper colony. (I'm sure we all remember our first leper colony!) She looks like she's going to gag or shake apart as she tries, tries to force herself to fail that exam, though it's the least histrionic shaking you've ever seen, complete with what appears to be perspiration on cue. She is terrified and necessarily spry at repelling a violent patient who accosts her and tries to kill her, and then humiliated by the telltale scars on her cheek. She is bored and annoyed by the flippant charm and agnostic "wit" of the Peter Finch character, the doctor to whom she reports when she finally earns her long-desired assignment to a missionary outpost in the Congo. But Hepburn is always, always playing the spiritual ramifications of these episodes first, so that they palpably supersede the sensations of a given moment. Her movements, without seeming over-rehearsed from the standpoint of acting, reveal Sister Luke's gradually cultivated self-consciousness about how others will observe her, how a holy eye will assess her, how she will or won't satisfy her own self-inspections ...and whether she will come to feel, as begins to seem possible, that the church's standards are not finally habitable for her, and that she can only make good on her promises to God and on her capacities for helping others by stepping away from God's and others' most revered institution. The Nun's Story, as written, directed, and performed, preserves this as an impossible choice. A baseline of disquiet emanates at all moments from Hepburn's face and movements, though never at a garishly high pitch, and sometimes at such a low hum that you forget about it for a second, or maybe Gabrielle does.

When she finally resolves an untenable conflict by choosing half of her life over the other in the finale, the moment inherits the accumulated force of quiver and contemplation that Hepburn has sustained for more than two hours, without once looking like an actress asking to be lauded by fans or laureled by critics. Her final scenes are played almost entirely in a silent key, and without the same kind of trajectory or scale of test that confronts, say, Adrien Brody in The Pianist, she comes as close as any 1950s Hollywood star could possibly come to the double arc of Brody's Szpilman: surviving as the person he is, yet also ending up as a very comely husk of himself, an inspiring emblem of human will and a tomb of foreclosed possibilities. And speaking of how or whether memory serves, I have "four stars" written down in my notes about this performance, but for the life of me, I can't remember why. I have certain qualms about the film as it rushes through some later chapters with one eye on The War, and there's a certain bourgeois impersonality to Zinnemann's direction even when, as here, he hits his highest heights. In Hepburn's case, I might wrack my brain for qualms or peer again at her performance, as though through a microscope, and remember some wanting element ...but bless me, Father, I cannot presently think what it is.

The Best Actress Project: 1 More Down, 29 to Go