It is all too easy to remember Audrey Hepburn for the romance of Roman Holiday, in one of those magnificent frocks from My Fair Lady or that iconic publicity image for Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Behind that glamour and fame lay a darker story, starting with growing up in war-torn Europe and working with the resistance movement. It makes Hepburn an almost perfect subject for a bio-piece, elevating it beyond a rags-to-riches or tears of a clown narrative.
Add to those advantages that the gamine (oh, how she must have tired of being described so!) Belgian-born actress had a turbulent private life with an aristocratic mother, an absentee Nazi-sympathising father and two husbands.
In lockdown, Helen Anker, who like Hepburn embarked on a career as a ballet dancer before moving across to embrace performance more widely, wrote The Essence Of Audrey, which has just had a fleeting three-performance run at The Jack Studio Theatre. Lucky you if you got to see it.
A longtime heavy smoker, Hepburn died of cancer aged 63, but there is a lot of life to fit into 60 minutes, and if there are moments that feel a little contrived, or the largely chronological narrative feels rather like a list of milestones being ticked off, these are few in number and there is never any doubt that we are hearing Audrey’s story on her terms.
On her personal life, this Audrey is more candid about the deprivations and hardships of her early life than she is on her two failed marriages, the focus of which stays more on the romantic, swept away aspects than the harsh realities, or her own dalliances.
Anker cleverly also draws from the periphery of Hepburn’s life, with Hollywood gossip about how petty and obnoxious Humphrey Bogart was on the set of romcom Sabrina, her trumped-up rivalry with Julie Andrews over My Fair Lady and her admiration for Givenchy with whose help her propulsion to status of fashion icon was assured.
I inwardly cringed at the emetic “Moon River” with struggled guitar accompaniment, but the multi-award-winning song from Breakfast at Tiffany’s won favour and applause from Thursday’s audience, and who am I to begrudge that.
Anker’s performance captures the essence of Audrey, her look, intonation and balletic grace, but also her frailty, her love of family and children and the importance of finding happiness and inner tranquillity in her relationship with Rob Wolders.
It might be more appealing, or even just nostalgic, to associate Audrey Hepburn with that little black Givenchy dress and Tiffany necklace, or on the back of that Vespa with a gorgeous Gregory Peck, or perhaps her humanitarian work, but as Anker’s play shows, there was much more to her than that.
The Essence Of Audrey serves to remind us how much we miss if we fail to glance behind the cinematic glamour to see the ordinary people with insecurities and dreams like the rest of us.