Celebrating 2020 Valentine's day: Travel to Paris with Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn in front of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, June 1956

Audrey Hepburn(4 May 1929 – 20 January 1993) was born in Belgium, grew up in Netherlands and England, her first husband was American with some Spanish heritage, her second husband was Italian, she settled in Switzerland and her last companion was Dutch, but she has a very special connection with France, in particular, Paris.

Audrey Hepburn as Gigi by Colette, 1951

In 1944, the French novelist Colette wroter Gigi, which became very successful and was adapted into a film in France in 1949, and Anita Loos wanted to make it into a Broadway play.

When the wheelchair-bound Colette was being pushed along the Monaco seafront, she spotted a young girl wearing a one-piece black swimsuit outside Hotel de Paris. “Voilà ma Gigi!” That young girl was Audrey Hepburn, who was making the film Monte Carlo Baby in Monaco. She became Colette's Gigi, thus her first conection with France, with Paris.

Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina with Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, 1954

Then Sabrina, a film in which Audrey Hepburn played the daughter of a chauffeur who worked for a rich Larrabee family in Long Island, and she was hopelessly in love with the second Larrabe son David. Her father decided to send Sabrina to Paris to save her.

Sabrina did not go to Paris in the film, and she made her soufflé in Paramount Pictures studio. But Audrey Hepburn did, and she met Hubert de Givenchy, in Paris, who made all of Sabrina's post-Paris wadrobe.

Three years later in Funny Face, when Audrey played Jo, a passionate intectual working in a bookstore in Paris, it was Givenchy again who designed her Parisian outfits after her extraordinary transformation to a breathtakingly beautiful mode making fashion shoot with Fred Astaire in front of Arc de Triomph and inside the Louvre.

Audrey Hepburn went back to Paris in 1963 with Cary Grant in Charade, a comic thriller, where she followed Cary Grant on Rue Monge and Rue Censier, dropped vanilla chocolate ice cream on his navy blue suit near the pont de l’Archevêché and kissed him on a riverboat on the Seine, and finally accepted his marriage proposal at Palais Royal.

Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn talk about marriage in Charade (1963), directed by Stanley Donen.

A year later, Audrey Hepburn was in Paris again carrying another new Gienchy wardrobe and a bird cage to try to make it sizzle with William Holden. But it seems William Holden's problem on screen - a Hollywood writer's block was just a mirror of his problems off screen - his alcholism which affected the production so much that the movie title may as well be named Paris when will it sizzle instead of its original title: Paris when it sizzles.

Fortunately, the legendary director William Wyler decided to invite Audrey Hepburn to Paris again in 1963, making her the daughter of  an art collector and forger so Peter O'toole can investigate her father and fall in love with her in How to steal a Million.

In this film, Audrey Hepburn incarnated a picturesque Parisian girl living la vie en rose wearing Givenchy dresses and coats, driving red Eden Roc, living in a big house in Neuilly-sur-Seine with her father, and rendezvousing in Ritz hotel...

It could be said that How to steal a Million is a film showcasing Audrey's love affair with Paris, and it would be her last film made in and about Paris.