For several years in the ’50s, when Oscar nominees were often as committed to Broadway as Tinseltown, there were not one, but two Academy Awards gatherings each year, held simultaneously at the Pantages Theatre in LA and the NBC Century Theatre in New York City. On the night of the 1954 event, Best Actress nominee Audrey Hepburn, then in the middle of a run of Ondine, had a performance to get through at the 49th Street Theatre pre-ceremony, leaping into a waiting Rolls Royce with her future husband Mel Ferrer as soon as the curtain fell. By the time the Roman Holiday star arrived at the Oscars’ Midtown venue, the broadcast was already well underway, and she darted past the paps assembled in the lobby to change out of her seaweed-strewn water sprite costume and into her ivory guipure dress.
Givenchy, of course, had a heavy influence on its design. Audrey had paid a visit to Monsieur Hubert’s atelier the previous summer – with the designer agreeing to meet “Miss Hepburn” after mistakenly assuming it was MGM titan Katharine who’d be dropping into his 8e arrondissement workshop. He was surprised, then, by the “very thin person with beautiful eyes, short hair, [and] thick eyebrows” who turned up in his lily-filled foyer in lieu of the First Lady of Cinema. “On her head was a straw gondolier’s hat with a red ribbon around it that said VENEZIA. I thought, ‘This is too much!’” Still, when he witnessed her modelling his creations – a white organdy gown, a pencil-grey flannel suit, a black cocktail dress – he realised he’d found someone who could “give life” to his clothes as no one else could. Audrey left 8 Rue Alfred de Vigny that day with three couture looks for her upcoming turn in Billy Wilder’s Sabrina and an invitation to dine with Hubert at an “existentialist” bistro on Rue de Grenelle, the beginning of what Givenchy would term a decades-long “marriage”.
Written by French playwright Jean Giraudoux, Ondine starred Hepburn as a water nymph who falls in love with a chivalrous yet fickle knight, embodied by Ferrer. Here, she applies eyeliner backstage at the 49th Street Theatre.
All that being said, it’s actually Hollywood costumer Edith Head, not Givenchy, who conceived the elegant, prim confection Hepburn wore to collect her only Academy Award. Audrey can be seen in the original look in the final scene of Roman Holiday, when Princess Ann greets the world’s press in the Palazzo Colonna gallery. By the 26th Academy Awards, however, Hepburn’s tastes had evolved, and she had the dress reimagined, ditching its lantern sleeves and adding a bateau neckline but keeping the belted circle skirt. As Kerry Taylor auctions, which sold the dress for £70,000 in 2011, noted at the time: “The basic dress was an Edith Head creation, but the new bodice cut straight across at the front [and] plunging low at the back with pretty spaghetti straps was undoubtedly inspired by the gowns she had been wearing by her beloved Givenchy.”
In her dressing room at the Century that historic night in 1954, a hurried Audrey slipped the reworked dress on, added the diamond and pearl earrings she wore as Princess Ann for “luck”, then tiptoed into the auditorium with Ferrer. Perched next to her mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, who had just flown in from London, Hepburn sat biting her nails as the ceremony wore on. When actor Donald O’Connor finally announced her as the Best Actress winner, she was so stunned she was close to tears, darting up to accept her statuette perhaps a little too quickly. The overwhelmed 24 year old soon took a wrong turn, and ended up in the wings of the theatre instead of onstage with emcee Jean Hersholt. A born performer, she delivered a self-deprecating, comic frown to much appreciative laughter. “It’s too much,” she said in her sing-song tones when she finally made it to the podium’s microphone. “I’m truly, truly grateful, and terribly happy.” So deliriously happy, in fact, that she later misplaced her statuette amongst the chaos that followed. In the end, it turned up in the ladies’ room of the NBC Century Theatre – and was restored to its owner in time for her Paramount press conference the following morning, where she posed surrounded by hundreds of congratulatory telegrams.
When Hepburn arrived at the 1954 Oscars, she still had her Ondine costume and make-up on, getting ready on site.
“I want to say thank you to everybody who through these past months and years has helped, guided, and given me so much,” Audrey told the crowd when she accepted her statuette, with 43 million Americans watching from home.
Hepburn, surrounded by congratulatory telegrams and her Oscar, at a Paramount press conference the day after the ceremony.
