Audrey Hepburn In Love In The Afternoon – Performance Is Personality

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Hepburn plays Arianne Chavasse,  the daughter of a private detective who specialises in creating dossiers on illicit affairs for cheated spouses. Hepburn takes an unnatural interest in her father’s work, delving into his filing cabinet and hungrily reading up on his juiciest cases. It is through the file on Gary Cooper that Hepburn falls in love with him, following the serial exploits of this international playboy as he creates cuckolds the world over. She finally meets him in the flesh however, when she learns that the husband of his latest girlfriend is to go to Cooper’s room at The Ritz and shoot him dead. When she fails to get the police to intervene, Hepburn decides to forewarn Cooper herself, climbing in through his hotel room window in the process.

It is in these scenes with Cooper that Hepburn is at her most wonderfully impish; a beautiful pixie masquerading as a scarlet woman. Cooper becomes infatuated with her. In turn, she is intimidated by the charming, older man but feigns insouciance to keep him at bay. Concealing her true identity – she won’t even tell Cooper her name – she instead pretends to be a nonchalant player with a string of lovers in tow. And it is Hepburn’s cross-pollination of this innocent romance and posed coolness that really makes her performance a sight to behold. Her effort to show Cooper that she is his match in matters of love when clearly we know she isn’t, paradoxically reveals her natural vulnerability, her need for acceptance and, finally, her humility – not the character’s humility, not the script’s humility, but Hepburn’s own humility, and it is beautiful.

Hepburn’s performance reveals to us, via imaginary circumstances, the sweetness of her nature. And it is this truth, this revelation of her soul, that makes her performance so affecting. Our acting is great then, when we show ourselves, the truth of our own personalities, who we are with all our strengths and weaknesses. When we act truly we do not “transform” – in fact an attempt to “transform” is an attempt to negate ourselves – when we act truly we reveal ourselves, as Hepburn does. Our performance and our personality are the same thing. To “construct” a character, to “become” someone else, is to lie. When the audience is affected by our performance, they are affected by our truth. Our performance is our personality.

 

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