The Audrey Films

Abstract This chapter examines “the Audrey film,” which follows a Cinderella template for the plot and for which Audrey Hepburn is best known. Using Sabrina, Funny Face, and My Fair Lady to exemplify the Audrey film, the chapter then considers variations of the template in Roman Holiday, Love in the Afternoon, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Paris When It Sizzles. While pointing to the many contradictions inhering in her star image, the chapter emphasizes the liminality that Hepburn represented in these, her most memorable, films of the 1950s and early 1960s. It demonstrates how her characters’ mischief, intelligence, unconventionality, and desiring supply the primary motor for the fairy-tale plots. These qualities also resist the films’ patriarchal template and closures and complicate her asymmetrical casting opposite older male stars.