(Credits: Far Out / ETH Library Zurich)
Audrey Hepburn wasn’t the type of star who grew up dreaming of being famous, but when she made her Hollywood debut in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday in 1953, she rocketed to stardom faster than most stars before or since. Her innate gracefulness and vaguely European accent made her seem almost otherworldly, and she quickly became one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading ladies.
Hepburn left a deceptively large footprint in the industry. Despite being one of the most well-known figures of the 20th century, her Hollywood career lasted less than a decade and a half. Unlike Katharine Hepburn or Bette Davis, she wasn’t interested in being on the silver screen until the bitter end. She opted out of the whole thing when she was still in her thirties and hardly looked back. For some actors, the all-consuming work of a Hollywood star brings the type of fulfilment that can’t be beaten, but for Hepburn, it was more of a hindrance than anything else.
All of this came to a head in 1967 during the filming of Wait Until Dark. Directed by Terence Young, the film starred Hepburn as a blind woman in New York who is terrorised by a gang of criminals who believe that she is unknowingly hiding a cache of drugs in her flat. The role required her to be constantly on edge, gaslit, terrified, and fighting for her life, which would be a challenge no matter who you were or what you were going through in your personal life. For Hepburn, it came at an already challenging time.
Her marriage to actor Mel Ferrer had been on the rocks for years, with many of her friends claiming that he had been controlling from the beginning. By 1967, they were nearing the end of their union, which was complicated by the fact that he was a producer on Wait Until Dark.
Hepburn found the whole process to be deeply painful for another reason, too. While Ferrer was all too proximate, their child was not. “I had been completely miserable while making Wait Until Dark because I had been separated from my son, Sean, for the first time,” she said later.
All in all, the experience was enough to make her want to leave Hollywood for good. After earning her fifth Oscar nomination for the role, she divorced Ferrer and moved to Europe full-time. It wasn’t as abrupt a move as it might have seemed. In 1960, she had relocated to a rural village in Switzerland and began turning down many of the roles that she was offered. She had already slowed her career significantly, but after Wait Until Dark, she only appeared in four feature films for the final three decades of her life.
As far as near-swan songs go, Wait Until Dark was a good one. It might not have been a deliberate finale on her part, but it turned out to be one of her best movies, even if it remains criminally underrated. This isn’t the doe-eyed Hepburn of Sabrina and Funny Face, nor is it the impossibly elegant Hepburn of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The film is grittier, darker, and much more suspenseful than any of her other movies and has one of the most effective jump-scares of all time.
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