Best Actress: Audrey Hepburn
Pure glamour and elegance!
We're back with the Rewatching the Best Actresses series after a summer hiatus, and was I strategic in pausing right when I got to Audrey Hepburn's Oscar-winning performance in Roman Holiday? You betcha! I knew I'd want a favourite film to ease back in with, and I so adore Roman Holiday.
It's a rare romantic comedy win, although there are a lot of dramatic moments in this, and does it technically qualify where there's no happy ending? And it's all due to the charm of Audrey Hepburn and the magnetic chemistry she shared with Gregory Peck that makes it work. Audrey was regal elegance and Gregory was the everyman you rooted for (I mean, the man's most famous for playing Atticus Finch, need I say more?) and when you pair them up as a princess and a journalist, they just work.
The innocence and naivety on Audrey's part as Princess Ann, the weary royal who desperately wants to live a normal life, sells it. You fully believe this charming creature has never worn pyjamas or had an unauthorized haircut. You also fully believe this actress has noble blood (I'd need a whole other post to break down her aristocratic background, but yes, her mother was a baroness) and is the perfect choice to play a princess.
Where royalty on film is concerned (as something of an aficionado on the topic), so many actors go the campy route and play it with their nose in the air, like the audience is in on the joke and that to be believed as one of the royal blood they must play it theatrically. Not Audrey. Her Princess Ann is in the similar style of a Princess Diana, a Kate, a Queen Margrethe of Denmark. Effervescent, straight-shouldered, hint of a smirk, while still looking and acting impossibly chic.
Another reason I love Roman Holiday is the chemistry between Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. Her first and only age-appropriate love interest for a while, the two connect onscreen and stay locked in until those melancholic final glances as the ending music begins to play. She teaches him love and humanity, he teaches her how to have fun. They sell the romance between the characters bit by bit. This isn't a love-at-first-sight story, like so many princess stories are, it's built over the course of a day.
And while it's so charming, you never lose sight of the fact that it is, indeed, just a holiday for them. Their love would never work in practice; in the '50s he never would've been accepted as a royal consort and she wouldn't have been able to give up her throne or place in the line of succession for him. I know there were talks of a sequel in the '60s and normally I hate continuations of perfect films, but I would like to visit the timeline where that movie did happen so I could see it. I fully believe Audrey and Gregory could've sold it.
Roman Holiday is, in my opinion, a perfect film. It's got a perfectly paced story, it's perfectly cast (I've waxed enough about Audrey and Gregory, now I'm sparing a line or two for Eddie Albert, who plays photographer Irving Radovich, who's introduced as a womanizer but is actually a sweetheart underneath the polish. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor and it's criminal that he didn't win.), and the direction under William Wyler is perfect.
There's a reason this movie is a classic. It takes itself seriously because it's the rare royal story that works on film. Audrey sold it to us and we bought it, and her spot in the pantheon of Hollywood was secured, because she won an Oscar for this, her first major role.
DID I LIKE ROMAN HOLIDAY? This is the easiest answer: I adored Roman Holiday. It's definitely amongst my top 10 (she says, without having ranked anyone yet, or ever? Who knows. All I know is I would fight for this film. If nobody likes it anymore, I'm dead).
Did you like Roman Holiday? What are your thoughts on Audrey Hepburn's Oscar win?
Keep up with all my Rewatching the Best Actresses posts here.
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