For Fans of Audrey Hepburn

William Wyler's 1953 film did something no studio had quite managed before: it made royalty relatable by showing the cost of duty. Audrey Hepburn's Princess Ann is not naive, she is starved. The romance with Gregory Peck's reporter works because both parties know it cannot last, and both choose it anyway. The final scene, where she returns to her obligations and he watches her go, is one of the most quietly devastating in Hollywood history. Every runaway-princess story since owes it a debt.

Truman Capote's novella and Blake Edwards's 1961 adaptation share a name and a setting, and not much else. The book's Holly is harder, more damaged, and never finds peace. The film softens her toward a conventional ending that Capote publicly hated. Both versions are worth knowing: the film for the performance, the mood, and Henry Mancini's score; the book for the sharper truth underneath. Together they tell you something about what Hollywood of the 1960s was and was not willing to say out loud.

Stanley Donen's 1963 thriller is built on a single pleasurable uncertainty: Cary Grant's character changes his name four times, and neither Audrey Hepburn's widow nor the audience knows whether to trust him. The film borrows the grammar of Hitchcock, the wardrobe of Givenchy, and the architecture of Paris, then combines them into something genuinely its own. It is funny and frightening in roughly equal measure, which is a harder trick than it looks.

The 1964 musical is often read as a love story. It is more accurately a study in who gets to claim credit for transformation. Henry Higgins takes a woman with native intelligence, drive, and a clear sense of herself, strips those things away, rebuilds her to his specification, and then is confused when she does not thank him. Audrey Hepburn's Eliza Doolittle wins the film precisely because she sees this clearly at the end, even if the screenplay hedges. George Bernard Shaw's original play, Pygmalion, was even less forgiving.