The letter that made Audrey Hepburn a star

It’s now hard to imagine anyone other than Audrey Hepburn playing the runaway Princess Ann in Roman Holiday (1953). The role seems tailor-made for Hepburn’s unaffected charm, spontaneity and youthful innocence, and she played it to perfection, winning the Best Actress Oscar for this, her first major role.

Frank Capra, who was originally to direct the project, wanted Elizabeth Taylor. When William Wyler took over he cast his net more widely, considering newcomers as well as more established young actors. En route to Rome to prep for the film, Wyler stopped in London where he met with his top choice, Jean Simmons, as well as seeing a number of other ingenues, including Hepburn.

Hepburn had arrived in London from the Netherlands several years before, and had begun performing on stage in cabaret as well as taking small parts in films, most memorably in Laughter in Paradise and Ealing’s The Lavender Hill Mob (both 1951). Her first big break came with Secret People (1952), directed by one of Britain’s most talented filmmakers of the period, Thorold Dickinson.

It was to Dickinson that Paramount’s London head, Richard Mealand, turned when Wyler requested a screen test of Hepburn after Simmons (caught in legal wrangles with Howard Hughes) proved unavailable. Dickinson had elicited a powerful performance from Hepburn in Secret People by sensitively encouraging her to draw on her past experiences in the German-occupied Netherlands during the war. He used a similar technique for the screen test, which was shot at Pinewood Studios in September 1951.

Alongside the standard practice of shooting a number of scenes from the film’s script, Wyler asked Dickinson to give him a sense of Hepburn when not acting. To this end Dickinson decided to film an interview with her:

“We loaded a thousand feet of film into the camera and every foot of it went on this conversation. Audrey talked about her experiences during the war, the Allied raid on Arnhem, and hiding out in a cellar. A deeply moving thing.”

As this letter from Wyler to Dickinson (wrongly calling him ‘Harold’) reveals, the American director was immediately taken with the actress and her personality as revealed through the test. Hepburn did, of course, get the part, setting her on the route to lasting stardom. 

Notably, the test itself was deemed so successful that Paramount used it for publicity purposes, incorporating it into a featurette for a popular US TV show, giving audiences the chance to see this fresh new star in the process of being made.

Dear Mr Dickinson

The Audrey Hepburn test you made is a fine piece of work, and I just wanted to tell you how much we liked it here at the studio. You gave us a good look at the girl’s personality and charm, as well as her talent. As a result of the test, a number of the producers at Paramount have expressed interest in casting her.

I can’t say at the moment whether or not we will use Miss Hepburn in Roman Holiday, but if we don’t you may be sure it will not be because of anything in the test – which is as good as any I’ve seen in a long time.

With many thanks and best wishes

Sincerely, William Wyler

Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.