Audrey Hepburn A-Z: Y is for...
Y is for... Terence Young!
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A quirk of fate and two thrilling films resulted from the partnership of Audrey Hepburn and Terence Young.
When Audrey Hepburn was a teenager trying to survive Nazi Occupation, she volunteered at a Dutch hospital and helped nurse back to health a British paratrooper after he'd been injured in the Battle of Arnhem.
The battle, which took place from September 17-25, 1944, was one of the major operations of the Second World War, ultimately saw the defeat of the Allies, with 1,300 soldiers killed and 2,000 wounded. It wouldn't be until May 1945, around Audrey's 16th birthday, that the Netherlands were liberated.
The British paratrooper she helped nurse back to health? Terence Young, who would go on to become a movie director and the first director to helm the enormously popular James Bond series (he directed Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Thunderball).
In 1967, as Audrey started to wind down her film career and focus more on motherhood, she made two films: Two for the Road and Wait Until Dark. It was this second film that saw Audrey reunited, in an incredible quirk of fate, with the paratrooper she'd nursed over 20 years before. He joked that he didn't realize he was shelling his favourite actress.
Wait Until Dark is a thriller/horror film in which Audrey plays a newly-blind woman named Suzy who's terrorized by two men, played by Alan Arkin and Jack Crenna, who are looking for drugs they believe are in her apartment.
To prepare herself for the film, Audrey visited a school for the blind, learned Braille, trained herself to stare with a blank gaze, walked around with a blindfold on and only a stick to guide her, and taught herself to complete self-care tasks without the help of a mirror.
When the film came out, it was widely-praised, both critically and commercially, and a campaign to truly terrorize theatre-goers saw the theatres dimming their lights as Suzy smashes all the lightbulbs in her apartment, then plunging the theatre into total darkness as Suzy breaks the last one.
Audrey earned her final Oscar nomination for the film, though co-star Alan Arkin, who'd done a magnificent job terrorizing her (and audiences), did not. He told reporters that nobody gets an Oscar for terrorizing Audrey Hepburn, when asked.
After Wait Until Dark... Audrey left Hollywood behind. Audrey would say about her decision to quit films that, "I had always wanted children so badly that I was miserable when I went off and did [Wait Until Dark]... I could not bear to be separated from him, so I stopped working."
The following year, she and Mel Ferrer divorced, and in 1969, she married Dr. Andrea Dotti. Her second son, Luca, was born in 1970. Audrey spent the '70s largely as a housewife and mother, but returned to the big screen for Robin and Marian in 1976 (co-starring Sean Connery, which impressed her children as she'd be acting with James Bond himself).
In 1979, Audrey made a melodramatic movie called Bloodline (the only R-rated film of her career) and reunited with Terence Young once more. She insinuated that the only reason she really signed on for the role of a pharmaceutical heiress who has to prevent her murder was because of him. Her marriage to Dotti was on the rocks at the time, and this provided a welcome distraction, though they didn't divorce until 1982.
Bloodline isn't one of Audrey's best pictures, so you'd be remiss if you haven't seen it. She agreed to shoot on location because her children were away at school, but she took frequent trips to visit them after working it out in her contract. Her co-stars were also aloof, and the crew were largely young and didn't really realize who she was. Behind the scenes, she entered into a brief affair with co-star Ben Gazzara, though it never really took off and he wound up ghosting her.
Audrey only made two more films after Bloodline; Young only directed three more. He died in 1994 of a heart attack while filming a documentary in Cannes.
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Did Wait Until Dark terrify you? It terrified me the first time I saw it, but then, I can't watch modern horror films, they're too scary for me. What's another classic horror movie you love? Let me know in the comments!
Come back soon for the last entry in Audrey Hepburn A-Z!
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