West London
30 October 1950
Like many if not most film projects, this one had taken years to come to fruition. In fact, the outbreak of war in 1940 Britain had spawned Secret People, which was to be a tale of the dangers of information falling into the hands of the enemy as a consequence of loose talk. Audrey was eleven at the time bombs first fell on London and had recently moved to the Netherlands.
A full script treatment for Secret People didn’t emerge until after the war in 1946. By then it was still a dark tragedy that had mutated and now concerned a woman named Maria, who has a daughter named Nora. Their family had fled a totalitarian regime to pre-war London. There Maria meets an old comrade from her days in the Resistance, a handsome man with whom she had had an affair. He convinces her to deliver a bomb to another member of the Resistance—the bomb will be used to kill a leader of the totalitarian regime who is visiting London. The plan backfires and the bomb kills a waitress at a restaurant.
During the next four years the story treatment became a script and the plot was tweaked and tweaked again. Nora became Maria’s sister and a dancer, specifically a teenage ballerina. In the same four years Audrey, now twenty-one, had become a sort of actress in front of the camera. In fact, she had just completed a bit part: one scene and a single line with Alec Guinness on the Ealing Studios production, The Lavender Hill Mob. It had been the latest role in the progression from walk-ons with no lines at all to a line here and there, and Audrey still didn’t believe in this acting thing. She had been making a living as a dancer, but there was money in the moving pictures too, much easier money than dancing fifteen or twenty shows a week, and she needed all the money she could get to pay her share of the bills because London wasn’t the cheapest place to reside. Her mother had been working like crazy at any jobs she could get as well—housekeeper, seamstress, florist, and whatever else came along.
Audrey took one last drag on her cigarette to calm jangled nerves and walked inside the Ealing Studios front office in West London. The building looked more like somebody’s modest home than a center of British film production. Inside she met director Thorold Dickinson and his creative team. It had been Dickinson who first conceived of Secret People way back when.
Right away Audrey sensed she was wasting her time by what she could see in the faces of the people as she shook their hands. She was too tall—yet again too tall—and to make it worse, she happened to be wearing three-inch heels that must have made her look gargantuan. She completed her reading and walked back out into the daylight and did her best to put Secret People behind her.
One hundred fifteen days later, on 22 February 1951, the phone rang, Ealing calling. Could Miss Hepburn come in the following day for a second test as Nora in what was now being called The Secret People? She could? Excellent. Script pages would be delivered. After nearly four months, they wanted her back to test for the same part.
The next afternoon, a Thursday, Audrey repeated the practice, one last drag on her cigarette before walking into the cozy Ealing front office in West London. She didn’t know that she had been the first choice all along; she had been correct in what she had sensed, that she was too tall when compared with the men who had already been cast. That had been the debit against her. But the “Nora” seen the previous day had been deemed unsuitable in the audition because her eyes were too expressive and showed too much worldly experience. The production team had been haunted by the young Hepburn girl and looked at her head shot again; they saw big brown eyes that seemed to reveal only pure innocence. So Audrey was back, wearing flats this time, and now noticed the crude pencil scratches on the painted plaster wall of the office where every actor and actress had been measured for height—scrawled lines and names seemingly done in anger. It was the lesson the team learned the moment she had walked out almost four months earlier: Measure everyone’s height against that of the leading men.
Recently, the team had been testing potential Noras from the ranks of the London corps de ballet only to learn the dancers weren’t actresses; the Nora part was big and important, requiring not only acting skill but ballet as well. Question was, could this dancer called Audrey Hepburn possibly be an actress? This girl had managed only a few lines in a few pictures and was never a classical stage actress at all.
The part of Nora had evolved since the previous October, and Dickinson, the director, ran through it with a nervous Audrey: Nora is the younger sister of the lead, Maria. She must perform two ballet sequences before the camera, and she’s key to many scenes in the picture—many dramatic scenes, including one where she holds the dying Maria in her arms.
Audrey had to wonder if this was a dream—might she really be dancing ballet before cameras? Or a nightmare—she had no idea what to do as a dramatic actress and the idea of it terrified her.
She read the chosen scene with a production assistant. All she could do was feel her way through it and act and react on instinct. As a witness in the room that day noted, “After the first run-through, people start eyeing each other meaningfully; she has the quality all right. After another rehearsal it seems almost a waste of time to shoot the test.”
Audrey walked out of Ealing again with no commitment from them, but three days later the official call came: Audrey had been cast as Nora. It was her first featured part in a motion picture. One week later she reported to a London church for rehearsal of a pivotal ballet sequence. For the first time in a while she was back on a ballet stage for a performance. It was beyond heaven working with the choreographer and other dancers, as around them the director of photography and technical crew assessed camera setups and lighting.
Since the end of the war she had never stopped working. Ballet lessons, dancing in chorus lines, two shows a night, night after night, modeling for the still camera, bits on television, bits in the movies. She took anything, relentlessly, never saying no. Physical activity kept the mind too busy to think about the war and all that had happened. Now she had a big important screenplay to learn, and ballets to perform onscreen. All of it made the past bearable, just so long as she didn’t have too many quiet moments alone to think.