(5 of 6)
She got other small jobs—in movies, revues and nightclubs. A commercial photographer spotted her in one show and put her picture in every drugstore in Britain advertising the benefits of Lacto-Calamine. Meanwhile she went on with her ballet lessons and filled in her spare time studying dramatics under British Character Actor Felix Aylmer. "A pretty girl is not necessarily qualified for the stage," says Aylmer (who used to coach Charles Laughton). "What's most important is poise and motion. She had that naturally."
In November 1951, Audrey opened at Manhattan's Fulton Theater in the title role of Gilbert Miller's production of Gigi, a sophisticated Gallic story of a 16-year-old French tomboy who dreams of bourgeois marriage while her female relatives train her to become a rich man's mistress. Next day the New York Times's Critic Brooks Atkinson wrote: "Miss Hepburn is the one fresh element in the performance. She is an actress; and, as Gigi, she develops a full-length character from artless gaucheries in the first act to a stirring emotional climax in the last scene. [She] is spontaneous, lucid and captivating." The rest of the New York critics heartily agreed. Paramount Pictures and William Wyler, who had decided to keep their $2,200,000 production waiting for Audrey on the hunch that her play would not run a month, were obliged to twiddle their thumbs for half a year while audiences packed the Fulton to sigh and smile at the enchantingly gawky Gigi.
Audience Authority. Despite all the glowing praise from critics and public, Audrey was still far from sure that it was deserved. Night after night, she worried and fretted over her Broadway part. "She was terribly frightened," says Veteran Actress Cathleen Nesbitt, who was assigned by Producer Miller to take the newcomer under her protective wing. "She didn't have much idea of phrasing. She had no idea how to project, and she would come bounding onto the stage like a gazelle. But she had that rare thing—audience authority, the thing that makes everybody look at you when you are on stage." When things went wrong, Audrey would make her final exit crestfallen and out of breath from trying too hard. "I didn't get my laugh," she would say in distress to a fellow actor. "What did I do wrong?" At the end of the first week, when her name went up in lights on the Fulton marquee, Audrey darted across the street like a schoolgirl to have a look. Then, in sudden solemnity, she sighed: "Oh dear, and I've still got to learn how to act."
As a Broadway celebrity, she cared little for café society. Five out of six nights, after the show was over, she would go home with Cathleen Nesbitt and gossip happily over yoghurt and milk. Seeming both more naive and more sophisticated than most girls of her age, Audrey Hepburn, at 23, was a piquante mixture of adolescent bounce and womanly dignity. She could convulse friends with a hilarious imitation of Jerry Lewis, or pay a duty call, with all the necessary grace and assurance, on visiting Queen Juliana of The Netherlands.