The Top 10 Audrey Hepburn Performances

Many years ago, when I first began exploring classic cinema in my efforts to understand movies more and which ultimately led me down the path I'm on today, it was stars more than directors I gravitated towards. And more than just about any other, Audrey Hepburn captured my attention; as she has for so many over the decades. The diminutive but toweringly iconic Dutch-English actress who was one of Hollywood's foremost stars of the 1950s and 60s, in addition to starring mostly in movies directly geared toward my sensibilities at the time (I was quite a romantic) was also my first classic Hollywood crush. These factors, in addition to her small body of work compared to other stars of her generation (she quit the industry for her family in 1967 and only made a handful of appearances afterwards) meant it was relatively easy to absorb her entire filmography, which I did over the span of a few years. From her earliest walk-on appearances in British comedies like Laughter in Paradise and The Lavender Hill Mob to her final on-screen role in Steven Spielberg's otherwise forgotten 1989 film Always, I have seen her movie career from beginning to end.

She is therefore one of the only stars who I feel confident I can make this kind of a list for. And I do think it is worth making. Audrey Hepburn came to stardom during the latter part of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and a time when not a lot was expected from star performances so long as they broadly adhered to that star's carefully maintained persona. Taken next to the brand of star that succeeded them in the late 1960s (and generally through to most decades since) where commitment and transformation and versatility are more appraised, it's had the effect of making this era's film acting seem dull and antiquated.

It is not at all; indeed the Golden Age is a distinctly underrated era in terms of performances, and that extends to Audrey Hepburn as well, whose types, the doe-eyed ingénue and later the stylish and elegant débutante with her rise as a fashion icon, are capable of and in her hands express more nuance than she gets credit for. Audrey Hepburn was a great and highly respected actress. She came to Hollywood through theatre remember, winning a Tony Award the same year as her breakout Oscar win -forty years later she posthumously became an EGOT with successive Emmy and Grammy wins for a couple of her last projects. She was a beloved talent, who could go toe-to-toe with the luminaries of successive generations.

So here I’ll highlight her top ten performances, the best that still hold up and showcase the breadth and value of her talents. For a couple honourable mentions, see The Children’s Hour (1961) -a bold early queer film where she just happens to be upstaged by a better Shirley MacLaine; and Robin and Marian (1976) -a sweet little comeback movie after her pseudo-retirement in which she delivers probably the most interesting take on that figure of folklore. I still consider her one of the great actresses of movie history, and these performances are the reasons why:

10. How to Steal a Million (1966)

Admittedly, Peter O’Toole is probably the greater stand-out of this lightweight heist movie, a showcase of his suave charisma to compliment her style -but that style doesn’t come with nothing. As the daughter of an art dealer whose made a fortune in forgeries desperately trying to save him from being exposed with the help of a con man, it is one of Hepburn’s more driven and active roles; from her confrontation of the apparent thief in their home, to taking charge of the business side of her father’s work in negotiations with an American collector played by Eli Wallach, to seeking out O’Toole’s crook for the purposes of a heist to steal back her father’s own forged statuette. Her look in the film is quite distinct: the beehive hairstyle parted dramatically on the left with a sharp curvy sideburn, thick eyelashes and mascara, and of course the interesting glamourous outfits -it’s one of the few times in her 60s career where her elaborate fashion suits a chique and wealthy character. And Hepburn does seem to act the part to these outward characteristics -with a fair bit of pride and modesty, but not so out-of-touch as to not be appealing. In a couple scenes she gets to really play audience surrogate in her reaction to O’Toole’s clever methods, as he guides her through the game of theft. And she takes to that with a subtle excellence, as well as her own moderate streaks of manipulation. How to Steal a Million is not one of her more memorable movies -even though it comes from director William Wyler who launched her career- and for pretty understandable reason. It’s not very ambitious in its plot, script, or aesthetics; but I think it is worthwhile as one of Hepburn’s stronger performances against mediocre material.

9. My Fair Lady (1964)

There are obvious problems with Audrey Hepburn’s performance in the iconic musical that she got at the expense of its original Broadway star Julie Andrews: the dubbing of her voice with Marni Nixon’s for the songs, which is very blatant and takes away from the authenticity, as does the fact that thirty-four year old Hepburn does not much look the part of the seventeen/eighteenish Eliza Doolittle. But it is possible to look beyond those details in the very good movie that My Fair Lady is, and Hepburn is a substantial part of that. She plays to perfect pitch the light silliness of the musical, clearly has a great combative chemistry with Rex Harrison, and is as charming as the street girl as she is the elegant lady. The cockney accent is written to be unconvincing, and Hepburn is having a lot of fun with it, likely drawing on her own elocution training as a girl for the frustration that builds up. For coming to the part under controversial circumstances, she also gives it her all in terms of energy and apparent enthusiasm. Whether or not it’s her voice coming through, she radiates passion to the film’s musical components -the movie does after all give her some dancing opportunities, which was her first love as an art form. And given the notoriety of this dub, it should be stressed that Hepburn was not a bad singer. She’d sung her own songs in Funny Face and of course “Moon River” was written explicitly for her lilting vocal range -and a couple of her performances are retained in the chorus of “Just You Wait” and a few of the reprises done in a lower register -it’s clear from them she can carry a tune. She does a lot in spite of these limitations, and for that I still admire her a ton when I watch the movie.

8. The Nun’s Story (1959)

Considered the personal favourite of her career by Hepburn herself, likely in great part due to its thematic significance on charity, The Nun’s Story is probably the movie if any after Roman Holiday that could’ve yielded her another Oscar (it was her third nomination, she lost to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top). It’s exactly the sort of movie and performance for the late 1950s that the Academy adored. A big chunk of it being set in the Congo, it has that “exotic” quality the industry had started chasing, paired with a religious subject that performed well with broad conservative audiences. As Sister Luke, Hepburn’s character journey is one of attempting to follow what she perceives to be her calling against her strained relationship to novitiate piety. One of the central points of the story is that she’s not meant to be a nun, she joins the order to go to Africa  as a nurse. And The Nun’s Story is not a movie that has aged well in its attitude towards Africa, much as it aestheticizes the place. Catholic conversion and colonialism are celebrated, with native traditions and beliefs invalidated alongside flippant beats of uncritical racism that can make it gruelling to watch. In spite of this, Hepburn gives an honest performance -probably more honest than many she has given in retrospect, considering her later extensive work with the Red Cross- and a performance of great emotional difficulty through all of the setbacks her character must endure up to and including contracting tuberculosis. It may be her first role where she can really be felt committing emphatically to the psychological nuances and convictions of a character -powerful enough to supersede her faith and dedication to the order, refreshingly depicted as somewhat stifling. It’s ending is meant to be bittersweet, but Hepburn ensures you are with her over the sisterhood all the way through.

7. Sabrina (1954)

In her second Hollywood feature, Hepburn played the daughter of the chauffeur to a wealthy Long Island family, pining after the younger playboy son before getting to know and falling for the brooding elder son. In between this fork in her affections towards the two brothers, she critically gets a sophisticated glow-up thanks to two years at a culinary school in Paris. Sabrina was the first and better of two movies Hepburn made with the great Billy Wilder, who essentially crafted the perfect compromise of a character for her -that allowed her to be both a humble underdog in the game of love and an exceedingly refined, desirable picture of elegance. Though it is Hepburn herself who deserves credit for playing so well both a pitiable naive despondence and an aspect of empathetic maturity, on both sides of her journey but also the tendencies intermingling. She shows a real talent in reading people, and places great value in what she gleans from that. Even in such an indiscriminately fierce and witty script that often favours other characters, Sabrina is the most engaging figure, for her personality as well as her looks (though Edith Head created the costumes it was on this movie that Hepburn began her long relationship with designer Hubert de Givenchy). Hepburn is the life of this movie, especially compared to her co-stars -an underutilized William Holden and an unusually stiff Humphrey Bogart, one of several love interests of her early career much too old for her. She has great fun with the part -I love her glee at fooling Holden’s David on the ride home, he unaware of who she actually is while giving her the attention she has so long craved from him. It’s a delightful little performance that makes the movie.

6. Charade (1963)

I feel like in recent years, Charade has gone from being one of those movies popular with a certain stripe of film fan to being a broadly beloved gem on par with any other classic of the 1960s. It has of course always had its admirers, myself among them -and it is the only Audrey Hepburn movie included in the Criterion Collection- but lately more and more movie fans seem to be aware of it, and love it as much as I do! Charade is quite an easy movie to love though, a pseudo-Hitchcockian thriller combined with quirky romantic-comedy that features lots of fun twists and turns, deceits and double identities. And two of the most charming actors of classic Hollywood at the top of their game. Charade gives Hepburn one of the best scripts of her career (courtesy of Peter Stone) and by proxy some of the sharpest dialogue she’s ever gotten to deliver. Not often did one of her movies allow her to exercise comedy skills, but this one does and she is consequently quite funny. All throughout you can tell she’s having a blast, and her chemistry with Cary Grant is perhaps second only to Gregory Peck as an on-screen love interest. They develop a wonderful rapport, the choice to make Hepburn the more assertive and flirtatious in their pairing (insisted on by Grant, actually cognizant of the awkward age gap) gives the performance an even brighter jolt of spontaneity and sexiness. And it results in some of her most beautiful little bits of romantic subtlety. She goes toe to toe with Grant in wit, and her playfulness through attraction and the exhilaration of working together as spies is utterly adorable. As much as she is frightened by the circumstances of the plot, of multiple goons apparently out to kill her for money she has but cannot find, she demonstrates a tremendous confidence and commanding presence -one of her first and most effectively mature movie showcases.

5. Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961)

By a good mile, Hepburn’s most famous performance, the one that most epitomized her style icon status eternally and crystallized her longevity as a household name for decades. It reshaped entirely her image and the course of her career, it gave her the only real song that she could make her own, and it was a complex acting challenge unlike anything else she’d performed on film. Holly Golightly, the sophisticated escort of a central character in Truman Capote’s already famous novel, was envisioned as Marilyn Monroe, whose star persona of mannered if naive class and intense sex appeal matched exactly the tendencies of this woman constantly wearing a mask of refinement to hide her past and deny the reality of her conditions. A high-end sex worker who envisions herself as an elite socialite -why would you cast the adorably waif-like Hepburn, who’d recently played a nun, for that? However it came to that though (to great consternation from Capote), Hepburn took to the challenge exceptionally, channelling Holly and all of her complexes brilliantly. Yes, the part played to her well-established classiness and due to censorship couldn’t fully delve into the specifics of her work and associations (and of course turned the gay male lead straight), but Hepburn alludes to all of it and Holly’s various other secrets and shames through artful insinuation in her poise, her expressions, and her general manner. This is a character she plays incredibly guarded, deftly consumed by her constructed image, and ill-prepared for the cracks that come to it. At the same time, she taps into the romantic instincts of the character in a wonderfully genuine way -selling aptly that it is one area where she isn’t putting on a façade. Add to that all the little character touches she brings, the spontaneity necessary for Holly in her every small interaction, and it’s no wonder this is what the name Audrey Hepburn will always be most remembered for.

4. They All Laughed (1981)

The latest movie on this list, They All Laughed by Peter Bogdanovich is far better known for being one of the dying gasps of New Hollywood and for the infamous murder of one of its stars, Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, between its filming and release. This and the magnitude of its failure obscures though the fact that Hepburn is at the centre of one of its intermingling love stories, and is alongside screen partner Ben Gazzara, the highlight of the movie. She had had an affair with Gazzara a few years prior, lending a radiant and authentic chemistry far exceeding many of her past romantic pairings. He’s a private investigator, she’s a millionaire’s wife suspected of infidelity. Of course she naturally takes to the role’s level of glamour -an early 80s sense of it though, so we get to see her in an open jacket, bell-bottoms, and a bit of an afro. She handles the romance with a familiar earnest sense of class, but paired with something a little more tragic to the inevitably brief affair -the implicit knowledge it may be her last chance at one. What makes her and Gazzara’s story so endearing relative to the movie’s other less engaging dalliances, is their maturity. Hepburn was fifty-one when she made this, and she carries the gravity, wisdom and surety of age. She’s the smartest person around and isn’t afraid to show it, shrewd and dignified, cool and in complete control -in spite of her husband’s distrust. And you understand why Gazzara, with his handful of younger flings, is so entranced by her. There is a subtle but potent sensuality to their scenes together, she’s sexy to him in an irresistible grown-up way. And Hepburn knows exactly what she’s doing in radiating that, understanding full well that Bogdanovich intends this to be a mirror to the real affair and consenting to it. She also gets to cast herself as a supportive elder to young cabbie Deborah (Patti Hansen) and project the image of a warm mother, and you can see how she’s touched by it. The last truly great Audrey Hepburn performance.

3. Roman Holiday (1953)

If ever I was asked to give a Sight & Sound Top 10, there’s a decent chance that Roman Holiday would be one of my picks. All these years later I am still in love with this pretty little romantic-comedy about the temporary love affair between an American expatriate journalist and an enigmatic European princess in Rome. It was the Audrey Hepburn movie that made me a fan and there is a reason she won the Oscar for it, beyond simply being its showcase new starlet. Consider how she comes onto the scene as Princess Ann, this exquisitely beautiful, regal figure -and within a minute you know exactly from her tacitly disgruntled face what her feelings are about this whole princess thing. And the movie is full of such little nuances to her performance -like that dawning realization when she finally awakens in Joe’s apartment or the calculating look she gives him when he suggests a holiday together. It’s a premise whereby two people play a game of innocently bluffing each other while falling in love over a day of adventure, and so she has to play this part of hiding her royal identity while masquerading imperfectly as an ordinary young woman. A charming comic balance that isn’t so easy to strike. But Hepburn does, peppered with an earnest excitement and curiosity with everything and everyone she meets. And she has never had a better partner to convey any of this with than Gregory Peck -the most wholesome of old Hollywood male stars- and himself utterly endearing, funny and gentlemanly the whole movie through. Their romance is as lovely as I’ve ever seen, they bring out the best in each other. At twenty-three, Hepburn naturally commands the screen with her ingratiating mixture of grace and dignity, eagerness and joy. She was more than ready to become a movie star! I love the goofy looseness of her drunken state, I love the vivid honesty of her reaction to Peck’s improvised hand prank, I love the thinly suppressed furious heartache when she returns home, and I love the bittersweet, soulful look of contentment she gives Joe at the end. A performance I will cherish in memory as long as I live.

2. Wait Until Dark (1967)

It’s a shame that Hepburn stepped away from the industry right as New Hollywood was taking off, because a movie like Wait Until Dark indicates she could have very well flourished in its harsher, more substantively visceral world. This was a film that was significantly darker than anything she’d made up to that point and that challenged her performance physicality in a way she hadn’t been called on before. Her character Suzy is a blind woman unknowingly harbouring in her apartment a doll stuffed with heroin that a crew of criminals manipulate and eventually terrorize her for. And while the tonal intensity can’t be understated (it is in fact her only movie with a jump scare), Hepburn’s mastery of the demands of the role is perhaps its most stunning asset. She completely reorients her usual performance choices, has to carry herself in a wholly different way as a person who must feel her way around her apartment and who never once can make eye contact with the other figures in the scene. It’s a substantial challenge for someone then so used to the motions of performance in pristine Hollywood, but she rises to it excellently and believably. And while it’s a performance designed to showcase vulnerability, Suzy is a character of tremendous strength, both in intellectual acuity -figuring out the plot and bringing her own machinations into it- and in action. The movie might be a little ahead of its time in how it draws Suzy setting a trap and then vigorously fighting back in the climax against a menacing Alan Arkin -likewise giving one of the best performances of his career. It seemingly predicts both the slasher genre ‘final girl’ and the confrontational action heroine. And Hepburn relays both a powerful courage and fear in this -and again all the while playing blind. Naturally, this was her final Oscar nomination, and had she chosen to keep acting through the early 70s may well have been a template for a new screen identity and a renewed confidence about her abilities. As it is though, it was a perfect exhibition to leave her audience with.

1. Two for the Road (1967)

Before there was The Way We Were or the Before trilogy, Past Lives or We Live in Time, there was Two for the Road, the first great drama to explore the evolution of a relationship across time and one of the most underrated movies of the 1960s. And it is also where Audrey Hepburn gave the best performance of her career. In the non-linear story that opens on a couple  many years into a fairly unhappy marriage, Hepburn plays Joanna Wallace through a decade of periodic  trips to the south of France with her love interest and eventual husband Mark, played by Albert Finney. As the film cuts between five timelines, we see the gamut of their sometimes sweet sometimes dysfunctional relationship play out, from their first meeting to a tense holiday contemplating divorce. It is the most versatile performance Hepburn has ever given in a single film and one of her most compelling character portraits, as she breathlessly takes Joanna through disparate emotional states, revealing by them an ample amount of wit and intelligence and even some idiosyncrasies that lend a flare realism absent from many of her other movies. It’s quite a bold role as well, one that required her to be more scandalous than she was typically permitted, with a fair bit of sexual frankness in her dialogue, mild profanity, and a less virtuous character to some of her actions. But at the same time it allowed her to play someone with endearing personality quirks, a real goofy sense of humour, and a lot of variance in temperament as she had rarely been given the chance to showcase. Her chemistry with Finney, notably intimate, is thrillingly multi-faceted -perhaps owing to the never formally confirmed but likely affair they engaged in during production. They play off each other extraordinarily well -whether in scenes of warm sentiment or bitter argument. As true a marriage as has ever been seen in the movies. There’s a lot I could say about the film on its other merits: its vivacious script by Frederic Raphael and intrepid direction by Stanley Donen, its vibrant transitions and New Wave-inspired stylistic flourishes, its bittersweet themes on the disillusionment of romance and its place in the context of the emerging New Hollywood (it is perhaps the hippest movie Hepburn ever made). But each time I watch it, it’s for Audrey Hepburn; for the irrefutable and frankly exhilarating proof that she was indeed one of the great actresses of her time. And there will never be another like her.

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch

Follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch

Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch