The Moral Legend of Audrey Hepburn
Runaway Princess ~ Unicorn 01
Born Audrey Kathleen Ruston on Rue Keyenveld (French)/ Keienveldstraat (Dutch) in Ixelles/Elsene, a municipality in Brussels, Belgium, she was the only child of Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston (1889-1980), an English banker, and his second wife, the former Baroness Ella van Heemstra (1900-1984), a Dutch aristocrat.
Roman Holiday (1953)
Ann (Hepburn) is a royal princess of an unspecified country. She is on a widely publicized tour of several European capitals, including Rome. One night, she is overwhelmed by the strenuous demands of her official duties and secretly leaves her country’s embassy to experience Rome by herself.
Audrey Hepburn in Japan
Not one of life’s eternal questions, perhaps, but still a puzzler. Images of Audrey Hepburn crowd the entire archipelago — in posters, calendars, books, postcards, print advertisements and, most recently, in computer-doctored TV commercials. An overexposure that once prompted the following comment from my vacationing mother: “What’s the matter with these people? Don’t they know she’s dead?” And has been dead for nearly a decade.
“Did you know,” my friend slobbers, the tic having spread to both eyes, “that my wife has seen ‘Roman Holiday’ 18 times? That she wears her hair bobbed just like the Hepburn character in the movie, Princess Ann? And that every morning she likes to pretend she’s having breakfast at Tiffany’s?”
I answer him the only way I can. “So what?” My own Japanese wife has seen “Roman Holiday” 30 times, and for years she slept with a giant poster of Audrey Hepburn tacked right by her bed. Then when we planned our first overseas trip minus our kids, there was only one place she wanted to go:
“Rome!” she cried, echoing you-know-who in you-know-what. “By all means, Rome!” So we went.
“Hers is a mournful beauty,” my wife has said. “In ‘Roman Holiday,’ Princess Ann has to surrender her love — her dream — for family duty. She does so reluctantly, yet with grace. We Japanese admire that. Especially in the early ’50s, what with the wreckage of the war and with everyone giving of themselves for the sake of the nation, we understood such sacrifice well.”
Audrey Hepburn’s neck, Japan Times, May 20, 2001
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Hmm. But would she be considered moe?