ICONS and disarmed into

ICONS and disarmed into giving him a lift home. “The Hotel Ritz,” he instructs her. “It’s in the Place Vendôme.” “I know where it is,” she says. “You’re a very chic burglar, aren’t you?” Chicness is certainly something Hepburn knew about. In collaboration with the young couturier Hubert de Givenchy, she used her elfin face and slender figure to create a new vector of beauty, an alternative to the busty 1950s lusciousness of Marilyn Monroe and Anita Ekberg and the unreachable hauteur of Vogue models such as Suzy Parker and Lisa Fonssagrives. Modern women found her basic style – narrow black trousers, black ballet pumps, a plain black turtleneck, large sunglasses, perhaps a pony-tail – usable in all circumstances, on or off duty. Givenchy had first provided Hepburn with costumes for Sabrina, her second starring role, in 1954. Apparently the designer was momentarily disappointed, on their first encounter, that she turned out not to be Katharine Hepburn, as he had expected. On the face of it, few 1950s couturiers would have been overjoyed by the challenge of dressing such an understated star. But no little black dress has been more influential than the one that made such an impression in her portrayal of Holly Golightly in Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961. “It was a kind of marriage,” Givenchy told the journalist Drusilla Beyfus. “Little by little our friendship grew and with it confidence in each other. I always respected Audrey’s taste. She was not like other movie stars in that she liked simplicity.” “His are the only clothes in which I am myself,” she said. “He is far more than a couturier; he is a creator of personality.” Not that the girl who lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland with family members executed and deported, “Sometimes her performance in How to Steal a Million resembles a two-hour Givenchy catwalk show” 54 THE JAGUAR

Hepburn’s relationship with fashion and in particular Hubert de Givenchy became a lasting trademark throughout her big screen career who witnessed trainloads of Jews being sent to the camps and who almost died of malnutrition, and who left for London in 1948 to take a ballet scholarship with the Ballet Rambert, lacked that quality. Givenchy simply emphasised her defining qualities and made her more like herself – although that was not to everyone’s taste. “Nobody ever looked like her before World War Two,” the photographer Cecil Beaton sniffed. “Now thousands of imitations have appeared. The woods are full of young ladies with ratnibbled hair and moon-pale faces.” PHOTOGRAPHY: SILVER SCREEN COLLECTION / KONTRIBUTOR / GETTY IMAGES (2) She was 37 by the time she came to make How to Steal a Million, a combination of heist movie and rom-com, for the director William Wyler in 1966. Her beauty had matured and mellowed without losing the freshness of the 24-year-old ingénue in Wyler’s Roman Holiday, her first leading role, for which she won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA award in 1954. Sometimes her performance in How to Steal a Million resembles a two-hour Givenchy catwalk show restaged on location. She makes her entrance – at the wheel of a red Autobianchi cabriolet, a jaunty little drophead run-about based on the Fiat 500 – in a futuristic white helmet, oversized white-framed sunglasses, white suit, tights and low-heeled shoes. Then come a jade coat-dress, an impossibly elegant oyster dressing gown, a fine tweed suit, and – the coup de grâce – a black dress with lace sleeves and matching black lace tights and a black lace mask, worn to meet O’Toole in the Ritz bar (“This is a business meeting,” she says reprovingly when he offers her the opportunity of a drink in his room). A biography of O’Toole claims the relationship with Hepburn extended beyond the set, although both were married at the time: he to Siân Phillips, she to Mel Ferrer. How to Steal a Million is hardly the best work of either of its stars, and the sexual chemistry between the handsome couple is so light as to be barely credible. Many years later O’Toole remembered Hepburn as “delightful but troubled – she had very little confidence in her own talent. I’m surprised at how many beautiful actresses seem to have such a low opinion of their abilities and appearance.” The Jaguar, with its Paris plates, is the perfect vehicle for a caper filmed at a time when the mini-skirt was migrating from the King’s Road to the Boulevard Saint- Michel. Introduced in 1961, with a price tag that dumbfounded the likes of Enzo Ferrari (it was about a third of the price of one of his 250GTs, with similar performance), the E-Type represented a perfect expression of post-war modernity and swinging style. The model driven by O’Toole and Hepburn was a 4.2 litre Series I – the classic specification, manufactured from 1961 to 1968, which started out with the Le Manswinning 3.8 litre straight-six engine before the larger version was introduced in 1964. With either engine it took around seven seconds to go from 0-60mph and contemporary road tests suggested it could back up O’Toole’s claim of topping 150mph. As for Hepburn, she just kept getting more elegant. She was still lovely in Robin and Marian, opposite Sean Connery, in 1976, when she was in already in semiretirement. Although David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, called her “a creature of the fifties”, she defined an idea of style that outlasted not only the decade of her prime but her death from cancer in 1993, which followed many years of visits on behalf of UNICEF to countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia and Vietnam, where she helped children affected, as she had once been, by war and poverty. Following a final treatment in a Los Angeles hospital, when her illness was deemed terminal, it was Givenchy who arranged for her to be flown on a private jet back home to Switzerland, where she died in her sleep. The death certificate said that she was 63 years old, but the idea of Audrey Hepburn remains ageless. THE JAGUAR 55