Core Response: Hepburn, The Star Contradiction

In Audrey Hepburn: The Film Star as an Event, William A. Brown premises Audrey Hepburn’s spectacular launch into stardom by the statement that Hepburn’s face is an “event.” Later, Brown goes on to define “event” as a “spontaneous emergence of novelty attributed to not a single factor but to a multiplicity of factors.” In the same sense, Hepburn herself is a “multiplicity of factors” or specifically, a successful embodiment of contradictions. By existing as “not one thing or another but all things at once,” Hepburn resolves all sorts of contradictions: “savagery and refinement,” “intelligence and sexiness,” “intelligence and non-intelligence,” “dream and real life.” She makes glamorous Givenchy seemingly appropriate to all women – she holds the sanctity of holidays yet is simultaneously “the object of all fantasy and possible longings,” she plays glamorous characters who never work yet her childhood developed under horrendous conditions of Nazi occupation.

Hepburn’s contradictions culminate in a distinct sense of individualism echoed by many factors, perhaps most interesting, her nationality. Tightly split between American and European, Hepburn was born in the Netherlands, but her star was born in Hollywood. Hepburn’s racial ambiguities are echoed in her film roles: “Hepburn’s 1950 film roles often cast her as a European (Roman Holiday, War and Peace, Love in the Afternoon, The Nun’s Story.)" However, “when Hepburn’s characters are American, often they have European ancestry and/or live in or spend time in Europe, notably Paris.” Indeed, in last week's screening in one of my classes, Hepburn plays Joanna in Two For the Road, a story about an unhappy couple and their yearly traveling road to… Paris. While different critics have claimed her as American, European, or both, Hepburn’s true origins lie are extremely unimportant. Rather the importance and appeal of the issue lies in its ambiguity, and her ability to smooth over yet another ideological contradiction, painting the most contradicted – and thus personalized – star.

Brown emphasizes such contradictions, but he does so in a way to garnish Hepburn with an identity that is all-reaching and at once, equating her "star-person" to "cinema itself." While I agree to an extent, more importantly, Hepburn's reconciliation of contradictions paved a certain spot in cinema that didn't exist prior. This sort of fit that aligns with the timing and circumstances of an emergence may be paralleled by our modern heroine, Emma Watson. Like Hepburn, she is androgynous yet sexual, intelligent yet desirable, benevolent yet glamorous. Of course, both stars are beautiful and thin, but in context of the "mammary woman" dominating standard of the 1950s, such stars give rise to more acceptable feminine typifications in Hollywood.