I suppose with male leads in movies its something called "cool". A male actor generally has to have cool to be a star. Steve McQueen was cool. Bogart was cool. George Clooney has that as well today. I suppose "cool" is a guy who looks like he can handle himself in most any situation, but who also has just enough vulnerability for a female fan to feel that the right woman could get under his skin and maybe steal his heart.
With women who are movie stars its something else...eroticism, perhaps? Well, that will take a lady so far. A lot of people just want that. Elegance, sure. But not someone too aloof. (Garbo's persona is way too aloof for me, for instance. Grace Kelly is more my speed. Your mileage may vary.) Intelligence, certainly, but not the sort of woman who always seems to want to compete with the guys...like Jodie Foster for instance. Julia Roberts is more to my liking, and Sandra Bullock. (Again, this is my taste. This is not science.) But most of all I think a woman needs to retain a certain mystery on screen and still have an earth-bound charm in some kind of paradoxical chemistry to really be a star.
I can't speak for other men, but there are a lot of women I've been attracted to over the years as a film goer. But if I had a chance in Heaven to have lunch sometime with just one lady I saw in my whole life of watching movies and could to try and make her laugh at my jokes and my attempts at conversation and wit over a hour-long meal, that lady would be Audrey Hepburn. (My wife I think would understand. She's lived with my fascination with this remarkable woman for quite a few years. Oddly enough, I met the love of my life only a couple weeks before Ms. Hepburn passed away. I was down at the time since I had read Ms. Hepburn had had inoperable cancer and had gone back from Los Angeles to Switzerland for her final days. )My Shirley was a bright light when I needed her in part because the loss of such a great humanitarian and star (far too early, for she was only 63) made the world seem suddenly a good deal dimmer.
It started for me with the movie "Sabrina" (1954), which I saw at around age twelve. It was the first Humphrey Bogart film I ever saw and this was the early 1970's and Bogart was a very popular cultural icon in those times. He played an older magnate romancing Audrey. (A lot of much older men were often cast opposite her, as some critics like Molly Haskell have pointed out. )
But a funny thing happened when I saw "Sabrina" again about three years later. What was a Bogart movie for me the first couple times around suddenly became an Audrey Hepburn movie. There is a great clip of her standing in a chic outfit--you can see it for yourself on the You Tube link below. If you watch that clip you will see what I think is one of the most striking and beautiful images of a woman ever shot. And its a total "G" rated experience!
She made very few films, but about half of them were excellent and a couple like "Roman Holiday" (1953) and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961) are flat-out classic films. (Personally, I think her work in Fred Zinnemann's "The Nun's Story" (1959) is her best performance and, as she was nominated for an Oscar six times, that's saying something.) "Charade" (1963) is a great Hitchcockian romantic-suspense comedy with Cary Grant. Even in a movie like "Paris When It Sizzles" (1963) she is totally marvelous and believable even when the movie itself is a fractured mishmash of cliches and too-cute inside jokes about movie-making.
To me, Audrey Hepburn was that combination of mystery and charm that is too hard to really describe. She also had those eyes you see in the photo above...you get the idea, right?
Her later life after she mainly retired from films was devoted to her family and to making trips and appearances for UNICEF to bring the suffering of children inflicted with famine and diseases in the Third World known to those in more comfortable nations. I remember that when I think of Audrey...I think that's the way she would probably want the world to remember her for. But I also remember a certain scene at a train station in a black and white Billy Wilder movie that, incidentally, also had a couple guys named Bogart and William Holden in it. She was extraordinary in a that one moment in time,and, in other films and in other settings, one truly beautiful, chic and very sharp lady.
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