NPR

January 20, 1993, Wednesday

SHOW: ALL THINGS CONSIDERED

Alan Arkin Remembers Audrey Hepburn, Dead at 63

LINDA WERTHEIMER, Co-Host: Actress Audrey Hepburn died today of cancer in Switzerland. She was 
63 years old.
 
Hepburn was born in Brussels. She starred in a series of successful American movies, notably Roman 
Holiday with Gregory Peck, for which she won an Oscar, Funny Face opposite Fred Astaire, Sabrina 
opposite Humphrey Bogart, and many other movies.
 
In her sixties Audrey Hepburn looked her age and unchanged and elegant at the same time. She turned, in 
the last years of her life, from acting to other work serving as the spokesperson for the United Nations 
Children's Fund, travelling to areas of the world where children suffered, returning to ask for help for those 
children. She talked about her new role in 1988 shortly after returning from Ethiopia in an interview with 
Terry Gross.
 
AUDREY HEPBURN: One of the reasons that I never enjoyed doing publicity very much is that I found it 
very boring to talk about myself over and over again, apart from the fact that I wanted to protect my private 
life. Whereas now, there's something I do want to talk about and I welcome the opportunity to.
 
WERTHEIMER: Audrey Hepburn speaking with Terry Gross in 1988. Alan Arkin appeared with Audrey 
Hepburn in the movie Wait Until Dark and he joins us now. That movie, which was one of the last ones she 
made- she got an Academy Award for it, and it was a different sort of movie, Mr. Arkin, from anything 
she'd done before - a thriller.
 
ALAN ARKIN: That's right.
 
WERTHEIMER: I always remember this- the scene where you opened the refridgerator and all of a sudden 
we could see that the blind woman was in the light and she didn't know it.
 
Mr. ARKIN: Yeah. [laughs] I had the wonderful opportunity of apologizing to Lincoln Center last year 
when they had a gala for her which I wanted to do for 25 years. It disturbed me greatly, all these years, that 
I had been the one person, I think, in her career, to be cruel to her. I don't think the American public ever 
forgave me for that particularly and I don't blame them.
 
WERTHEIMER: She was- what kind of an actress do you think she was? She played so many roles which 
are kind of 'of a type,' a sort of breathless, glamerous, bright type of person. This was a very different role. 
Could Audrey Hepburn really- did she have more range than we thought?
 
Mr. ARKIN: Well, she didn't think of herself as an actress and I think she underestimated herself. I feel that 
her personality, her persona, was so big that it engulfed anything that she worked on. She just- she was 
bigger than any of the parts she worked on and I think she saw that as a limitation, but I saw it as an 
extraordinary gift. Every part she played had to live up to her extraordinarily grand soul.
 
WERTHEIMER: I remember thinking that- I mean, I'm sure almost everyone my age who was not a blonde 
thought that Audrey Hepburn- if we could only look like Audrey Hepburn.
 
Mr. ARKIN: Yeah, not just look like her, but be like her. She embodied- her work- not only her work, but 
one of the things about her that was wonderful is that what you saw on the screen was exactly what she 
was. There was no difference between what- the kind of person she was, portrayed on screen and off. The 
charm, the gentleness, the generosity, the courage, the optimism was all there in everything she did, all day 
long - the humor. She was what you would like royalty to be like and seldom is. She was- I found her to be 
an extraordinary person.
 
WERTHEIMER: Thanks very much.
 
Mr. ARKIN: You're welcome.
 
WERTHEIMER: Alan Arkin, who appeared with Audrey Hepburn in the movie Wait Until Dark. Audrey 
Hepburn died today. She was 63 years old.