Core Response: Hepburn's Perpetual Cinderella Story

Audrey Hepburn's name is synonymous with timelessness: the New Look fashion of 1950s and 60s styling, the pleasures of dressing up to sip cocktails and play board games, and the retro popularity of lounge music and nightclubs. Her performance as Holly Golightly in Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) remains an icon of youthful glamour (never mind the fact that Hepburn was already 32 when she played the role). The case of Hepburn's stardom moves beyond any reductive, reflectionist relationship between film and society: she requires more nuance in approach than viewing her as representative of her time. Indeed, as William A. Brown discusses in his article, "Audrey Hepburn: Film Star as an Event," Hepburn's distinctive appearance and inimitable vocal style were framed as a "singularity that is novel [...] and a catalyst for change" (141). In seeming to embody a multiplicity of feminine models at once, Hepburn's broke the mold for female film stars in the 1950s.

One phenomenon that Brown does not address in his analysis is the way in which the incongruity between Hepburn's unconventional looks and her status as Vogue's "new feminine ideal" played into the "makeover" narrative pattern. Many of the quintessential Hepburn films follow this Cinderella trajectory: the ugly duckling who blooms into a beautiful young woman and happily pairs off with Prince Charming. In Sabrina (1955), she is the awkward chauffeur's daughter who returns from Paris an elegant fashionista, wooing her longtime crush; Funny Face (1957) finds her a bookish clerk and leaves her a cutting-edge fashion model with Fred Astaire on her arm; in My Fair Lady (1964), she begins a cockney bumpkin and ends a high society debutante beloved by her handsome teacher. In each of these coming-of-age stories, the ambiguity of Hepburn's star persona allow her to be both childish and then mature, mischievous and then poised. These patterns take on an ideological dimension when one considers that they naturalize the equation between reaching maturity and recognizably performing femininity.

However, even when smoothed over by narrative resolution, Hepburn's unfeminine qualities transgress the parameters of normative, passive postwar femininity. Her unresolved passion bubbles to the surface in the form of hot-tempered outbursts or romantic desire. Playful elements remaining in Hepburn's performances signal the presence of an androgynous female identity not fully absorbed into "mature" femininity by her masquerade. As Dyer argues, "stars frequently speak to contradictions in social life [...] simply by being one indivisible entity in the 'real world'" (Dyer 30). The ambiguity associated with Hepburn's embodiment of the Cinderella trope therefore exemplifies the manner in which her star image negotiates the paradoxical terrain of postwar gender ideology.