AUDREY HEPBURN

Graphic treatment of the life of the golden-age Hollywood star and philanthropist.

Is there anyone who doesn’t love Audrey Hepburn? She lived admirably, after all: She served as a teenager in the Dutch Resistance, advocated tirelessly for UNICEF late in life, and in between she made classic films like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Italian comic artist Giacchetto and writer Botton tell Hepburn’s story, its arc beginning in the terror of war and the disappointment of not landing a much-wanted place as a ballerina, its trajectory marked throughout by lost and failed love. From that disappointment, Hepburn was able to put together a modest living as an actor in numerous small films, “if saying a few lines in unmemorable movies can be called that.” Then William Wyler, the famed director, happened on her, looking for an aristocratic-looking unknown to play opposite Gregory Peck in her breakthrough film, Roman Holiday. It’s problematic that Peck, of chiseled and almost Rushmore-like countenance, and the wispily breathtaking Hepburn don’t much look like themselves in Giacchetto’s renderings; it’s not so much a lack of skill in rendering as the absence of a sense of their inner essence and qualities, such as Hepburn’s ability to move across a scene as if walking on air. For all that, the story does show how Hepburn worked her way through tragedies such as a miscarriage after falling from a horse in an on-set accident, as well as lesser sorrows such as being overdubbed in My Fair Lady, though she had a perfectly fine voice. (“Apparently I was good enough to say ‘The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain,’” Botton has her say, “but not enough to sing it”). Readers wanting a blend of text and images will be better served, though, by Megan Hess’ Audrey Hepburn: The Illustrated World of a Fashion Icon.

A respectful and accurate, though not especially inspired, tribute.