29 Jun 2015

Geri Halliwell on the enduring power of Audrey Hepburn

God, the film maker Billy Wilder once remarked, had kissed Audrey Hepburn on the cheek. Wandering round the National Portrait Gallery’s new exhibition of photographs of the film star, “Portraits of an Icon”, you can see he was spot on.

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Effortlessly elegant yet endearingly cheeky; displaying a sense of vulnerability one minute and an awareness of her own power the next. Somehow, and it’s very hard to put your finger on just how, this is a woman whose appeal has spanned generations.

She has admirers of all ages, one of whom is the singer Geri Halliwell. I took her along to the Portrait Gallery today to try and work out just why Hepburn’s style has endured.

“I always think the way to tell a good song is, ten years later, does it still sound good?…Look at that picture and what she’s wearing, if you look at the fashion pages they are still doing it,” she says.

There Hepburn is, gamine in a pink shirt, or demure in a pastel dress and gloves. Halliwell says she’s been inspired by her movie heroine to be her own person. The night she grabbed the headlines in her infamous Union Jack micro-mini dress at the 1997 Brit awards, she’d actually planned to sport a more demure little black dress.

“I want to get engaged with life. Equally, I wanna be my own person. [Audrey] feels like she likes who she is and she’s comfortable in her own skin,” she tells me.

In Hepburn’s most famous film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly is an independent, fun-loving young woman, in charge and in control – and perfectly capable of whistling loudly for cabs on the streets of New York.

Yet there’s a fragility about her which remains somewhat troubling. Her health was delicate, perhaps a legacy of the near-starvation diet she was forced to survive on during the war. In several photos, she looks matchstick thin.

Halliwell has herself spoken in the past about her struggle with bulimia. Much slimmer now than she was as a Spice Girl, she nevertheless insists women are not one size fits all.

“There are all shapes and sizes. Some of us are giraffes, some of us are polar bears, some of us are flamingoes. Everybody needs to be celebrated,” Halliwell says.

Today, though, there’s a danger that all those differences are airbrushed out of existence. There’s a homogenity about today’s stars, which perhaps explains why it’s hard to think of an icon who will go the distance quite as Hepburn has.

For photographer Terry O’Neill, who snapped the actress many times, there’s one simple reason why her charm hasn’t faded. He blames the PRs for so tightly controlling today’s stars that you can’t see beyond the gloss and the airbrushing.

O’Neill got to know her, and looking at this exhibition you will too. Because whether it’s Hepburn with one end of her sunglasses in her mouth, ever-so-slightly-crooked teeth glinting, or Hepburn unmade-up and unwell in her final days, as a United Nations ambassador, in Somalia, you get a sense of the woman behind the icon.

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