My Fair Lady (1964)
A lot is said about Hepburn depriving Julie Andrews of the role of Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle that she had created on Broadway, but few remember that Paramount had once planned to star Hepburn in a non-musical biopic of Maria von Trapp. Rex Harrison did retain the role of Henry Higgins after Cary Grant famously declined. Yet, while Hepburn would miss out on an Oscar nomination after George Cukor forced her to mime to Marni Nixon’s playback, she earned her $1m fee by rising admirably to the challenge of a Shavian situation that must have reminded her of her own postwar diction classes with veteran actor Felix Aylmer.
Two for the Road (1967)
Hepburn was 36 when Stanley Donen and screenwriter Frederic Raphael talked her into a project she not only felt was risqué but also came excruciatingly close to home. With her own relationship with Mel Ferrer in serious difficulty, rumours spread that she and younger co-star Albert Finney had become exceedingly close while making this modishly non-linear cross-France chronicle of a 12-year marriage drifting towards the rocks. Yet Finney challenged Hepburn to jettison many of her trademark mannerisms and reinvent herself as a mature woman who had bitter rows rather than witty repartée and wanted sex as well as romance. Consequently, she came as close as she ever did to playing hersel
Wait until Dark (1967)
Hepburn earned her fifth Oscar nomination for her beguiling display of vulnerability and mettle in Terence Young’s oppressively tense adaptation of Frederick Knott’s stage hit. She prepared assiduously at the Lighthouse for the Blind in New York and took lessons in Braille and using a white stick. Thus, she resented being forced to wear contact lenses to hide her expressive eyes. But they also masked the pain of her off-screen problems with producer-husband Mel Ferrer and, following their divorce, Hepburn quit the screen for nine years. She then donned a habit once more to co-star with Sean Connery in Richard Lester’s touching paean to lost youth, Robin and Marian (1976).
