The first time it occurred to me that I might be lucky enough to make a picture with Audrey Hepburn was then Ben Gazzara walked into my kitchen in 1979 with groans of yearning. “Oh, my god, I'm in love! Oh, Audrey, my Audrey!” Ben had just returned to Los Angeles for playing opposite Hepburn in Bloodline and couldn't stop raving about her: “The sweetest woman I've ever known—she breaks your heart ... Audrey's a saint.” It's true that for actors of the most serious occupational hazards of filmmaking is falling in love with each other or with the director, and vice versa, but Gazzara and Hepburn—both at the time nearing the end of their failed marriages to others—had a dear and passionate relationship during the filming of that picture.

Unfortunately for the movie, their scenes together were really the only things worth watching in it, especially unfortunate considering this was Audrey's first film in three years, the last being Richard Lester's terrific (but not markedly successful) Robin and Marian with Sean Connery in 1976. Prior to that, remember, she had not been seen on the screen for nearly a decade, not since the smash hit Wait Until Dark (1967), in which she played a blind woman in jeopardy and for which she received her fifth Best Actress Oscar nomination. She had spent those intervening years bringing up her two sons. Following Bloodline, Audrey wood appear in only one other feature starring role: again with Ben Gazzara, and shot in Manhattan, They All Laughed was a romantic comedy we all made together—I wrote and directed—during the beautiful spring and early summer of 1980. While shooting, on May 4, we celebrated Audrey's fifty-first birthday. Seven years later, she was lovely as ever playing the lead in a forgettable TV-movie, Love Among Thieves, and then—as, appropriately enough, a guardian angel—in Steven Spielberg's Always (1989), devoting the rest of her life to her family and the world family of children she touched and nurtured through years of grueling UNICEF tours. In 1993, she died after a short bout with cancer; she was sixty-four.

To most of the world, Audrey Hepburn had arrived fully grown, so to speak, like Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Suddenly there she was in 1953, the English princess incognito in William Wyler's Roman Holiday, falling in love with the cynical American reporter (Gregory Peck) and transforming him through her extraordinary beauty and charm, her magical innocence. The public and the media around the globe fell in love at first sight with Audrey, and our Academy here, along with everyone else, instantly recognized the seemingly miraculous birth of a superbly accomplished actress as well as a film star of the first magnitude. She received the Oscar as Best Actress of the year. Overnight, as they say, this English-Irish Dutch-Belgian unknown, who had previously appeared only in tiny parts in six British films (1951-1952), became a world-famous and vastly popular American star. She was twenty-four.

The most respected and successful picture makers in the country all vied for her unique presence in their films; the fortunate ones who got her were: Billy Wilder (twice), King Vidor, William Wyler (three times), Fred Zinnemann, John Huston, Stanley Donen (three times), George Cukor, Terence Young (twice), Richard Quine, Richard Lester, Blake Edwards, and me. Her leading men, besides Peck and Gazzara, included Humphrey Bogard, William Holden (twice), Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrer (who also directed her once), Anthony Perkins, Gary Cooper, Burt Lancaster, Fred Astaire, Rex Harrison, Cary Grant, Peter O'Toole, Sean Connery and Albert Finney. Upon receiving numerous honors in the last years of her life, these exactly were the two groups of people she thanked.

Throughout the declining fifties and increasingly desperate sixties, Audrey Hepburn was a beacon of tasteful glamour, of sensitivity and of the integrity and innocence of youth; a symbol of unalloyed kindness, morality and goodness on a screen ever more darkened by those baser forms of life, and increasingly peopled by anti-heroes and ambiguous—or simply victimized, or eventually nonexistent—heroines. Audrey was as unlike Marilyn Monroe as she was unlike Grace Kelly or Elizabeth Taylor. It's been said that this Hepburn's appeal was a throwback to the world of the silent pictures, a far more rewarding time for variety in women's roles, or the 1930s when that other Hepburn, Katharine, dominated side by side with Shirley Temple. The great French writer Colette had first spotted Audrey crossing a Riviera hotel lobby—she was doing a bit in Monte Carlo Baby (1951)--and knew at a glance that this young woman must play the title role on the Broadway stage of her now-famous coming-of-age heroine in Gigi. Looking back today, we can see clearly that in the final full decade of the golden age of movies, Audrey Hepburn became the last true innocent of the American screen.

Robert Graves has said that a good way to understand people's lives is to put them into a mythological context. This is particularly easy when the larger-than-life, uniquely twentieth-century phenomenon of a true film star, one whose own vivid personality becomes the human basis for all the roles he or she plays. Hadn't Audrey played a princess and been entirely believable? The media certainly featured her as princess of the world from Roman Holiday onward. She had been the chauffeur's daughter (in Billy Wilder's Sabrina, 1954, Hepburn's second star-vehicle and second Oscar nomination), as well as a lowly detective's daughter (in Wilder's Love in the Afternoon, 1957), who grew up to be a society princess solely because of the magnificence of her glamour, charm, talent, and beauty. Wasn't this Audrey herself?

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