Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn's image has been doing so much work for so long that the acting underneath it now reads as an afterthought. The little black dress, the profile, the induction into the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame. The American Film Institute ranked her third among the great female screen legends of classical Hollywood, and she is one of a very small group of performers holding competitive Academy, Emmy, Grammy and Tony awards.

She was born in Ixelles, Belgium, in 1929 and began in British films as a bit player, on screen for a matter of seconds in The Lavender Hill Mob. Roman Holiday reversed all of that inside a single picture in 1953.

What she could do better than almost anyone of her generation was play a person thinking. The stillness is the technique: she gives you very little movement, an unplaceable European voice she never sanded down, and a face that seems to be arriving at a decision in real time. Directors who understood that got her best work. Sister Luke in The Nun's Story, Karen in The Children's Hour, Joanna in Two for the Road, and a besieged blind woman in Wait Until Dark, which is the only genuinely frightening thing she made.

The fashion-comedy run around it, Sabrina, Funny Face, Love in the Afternoon, Charade, How to Steal a Million, is enormously charming and much less interesting. She largely stepped away after the 1960s, returning for Robin and Marian in 1976 and a small late part in Always in 1989, and gave her final years to humanitarian work. She died in 1993.