ICONS Impossibly elegant
ICONS Impossibly elegant and always endlessly chic, Audrey Hepburn carved out a piece of fashion history to call her own. RICHARD WILLIAMS takes a look at how we all came to love the iconic actress and the style she invented “Pretty, isn’t she?” ...asks Peter O’Toole, and for a split-second we’re not sure whether he’s talking about the primrose E-Type roadster at the kerb outside a mansion in Paris or about Audrey Hepburn, who is turning her large eyes from the car to O’Toole and back again with an expression of distinct scepticism as she tries to reconcile the idea of the English smoothie she has just caught burgling her father’s art collection in the dead of night with this beautiful sports car. “She’ll do more than 150 miles per hour,” he assures her. “Useful for getaways, you see.” “Hmm. The robbery business must be pretty good,” Hepburn says, as she slides into the driver’s seat. She is wearing a magenta satin jacket over a short pale pink negligée with ivory lace trimmings. And gumboots. She looks like a dream. They carry on discussing the Jaguar. “It’s stolen,” he says. “I can’t drive a stolen car,” she responds. “Same principle,” he says, “four gears forward, one reverse.” She’s doing the driving because, a few minutes earlier, she accidentally grazed his arm with a ball from a flintlock pistol she’d snatched from a wall display to protect herself against the unknown intruder. Now she’s been charmed EXCERPTS FROM ‘HOW TO STEAL A MILLION’ ©1966 COURTESY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX. WRITTEN BY HARRY KURNITZ. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 52 THE JAGUAR
The combination of the primrose Jaguar E-Type roadster and Hepburn’s wardrobe in How to Steal a Million is equal parts fashion, cinema and automotive history; an image that lives on with Hepburn’s own iconic legacy THE JAGUAR 53
