Audrey Hepburn by Barry Paris

Author:Barry Paris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US

BUT AUDREY, we know, always had a weakness for Paris. She now flew there, in July 1965, not for a shopping spree but to make How to Steal a Million for director William Wyler—their third together—at the Boulogne Studios. The screenplay by Harry Kurnitz, from a story by George Bradshaw, was a light confection in the Pink Panther vein: Hepburn plays the daughter of art forger Hugh Griffith, whose flawless fake of a Cellini statue of Venus is about to be exhibited as the real thing. Ethical Audrey is so upset about it, and worried for her father’s impending arrest, that she joins forces with burglar Peter O’Toole to steal it from the museum.

Wyler and 20th Century-Fox pulled out all the artistic stops: Master designer Alexandre Trauner of Hungary was hired to create the beautiful sets. He, in turn, hired expert copyists for the gigantic labor of creating all the phony Renoirs, van Goghs and Picassos needed for the film.13az Mel had agreed to stay in Tolochenaz with Sean while Audrey worked in Paris and flew home on the weekends. Terribly fearful of kidnappers, she had bought a German shepherd (and later an Australian sheepdog) to guard their home and refused to let Sean be photographed by anyone. Her fears were increased in Paris when, one morning, a group of men in masks tied up the studio concierge and made off with the production’s payroll.

But her consolation was Peter O’Toole—and the fun they had during the eleven days it took to shoot the sequence in which they are locked up together inside a cramped museum closet, awaiting the precisely timed moment to execute their heist.

“If you’re not in a place like that with somebody you like, it can be very boring,” she said. Years later, the very mention of O’Toole’s name would make her burst into laughter. “My friend! He was very dear and very funny. I don’t know why, but he used to call me the Duke of Buckingham....”14

O‘Toole knew why. As he later explained to writer Ian Woodward, the reference was to the great nineteenth-century actor Edmund Kean and a colleague—both heavy drinkers—who were playing Richard III and the Duke of Buckingham in Richard III. Kean as the King tottered onto the stage, “thoroughly polluted with liquid light, started his soliloquy and the audience began to call and bawl ‘You’re drunk!’ ‘He’s drunk!’ ... Kean glared at them and said, ‘If you think I am drunk, wait till you see the Duke of Buckingham,’ and, waiting at the side of the stage, was indeed the Duke of Buckingham on his hands and knees.”

But what did that have to do with Audrey?

“We were filming an exterior in Paris and the weather turned round and became very, very cold indeed,” O’Toole related. “Audrey had to walk across the street, get into a waiting car and drive off, but the poor child had turned bright blue with cold. The light was going and the shot was needed. I pulled Audrey into the caravan and gave her a shot of brandy.

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