Audrey Hepburn worked with the most celebrated directors of Hollywood’s golden age, including Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann, Stanley Donen, and George Cukor. But by her own account, only one man could push her to the edge of tears on set, make her repeat a single gesture dozens of times, and still leave her calling him the most important collaborator of her career. That man was William Wyler.
Wyler discovered Hepburn for ‘Roman Holiday‘ in 1953, pulling her out of the Broadway production of ‘Gigi‘ for what would become her star-making role and an Academy Award. But the director who launched her was also the one who wore down actors for a living.
William Wyler’s Legendary Perfectionism on Set
Wyler’s perfectionism was so notorious in Hollywood that colleagues nicknamed him “Forty-Take Wyler,” or even, at his most demanding, “Ninety-Take Wyler.” He was, as one retrospective later put it, “one of classic Hollywood’s greatest directors of actors, and also, according to the performers he worked with, one of its biggest pains in the neck.“
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Laurence Olivier, who won his first Oscar nomination working under Wyler on ‘Wuthering Heights‘, once described the breaking point of an endless retake session. “For God’s sake,” he raged, “I did it standing up. I did it sitting down. I did it fast. I did it slow. I did it with a smile. I did it with a smirk. I did it scratching my ear. I did it with my back to the camera. How do you want me to do it?” Wyler’s answer, delivered flatly, became legend in itself. “I want it better.“
Audrey Hepburn’s ‘Roman Holiday’ Crying Scene and the Making of a Star
Hepburn got a taste of that same relentlessness on her very first film. During ‘Roman Holiday‘, a scene called for her to cry, and take after take, the tears simply wouldn’t come. According to accounts of the production, Hepburn grew increasingly upset at her own inability to cry after so many retakes. Wyler solved the problem in the simplest way he knew, by yelling at her until she actually broke down in tears.
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It was a brutal method for a 24-year-old newcomer who, by her own admission, barely understood how a film set worked. “I didn’t know what a camera was,” she recalled decades later of that period. “I didn’t know what was going on. It was still new to me. I had no idea how to play a scene or anything.”
Inside ‘How to Steal a Million’
Even later in her career, when she was an established star, Wyler’s exacting standards hadn’t softened. On the 1966 caper ‘How to Steal a Million‘, co-star Peter O’Toole remembered the two of them repeatedly ruining takes simply because they couldn’t stop laughing at each other inside a cramped broom closet set.
Wyler, watching his stars derail scene after scene, grumbled with weary affection, “They react on each other like laughing gas, and the trouble is they’re in almost every scene together.“
Audrey Hepburn’s Lasting Tribute to William Wyler’s Legacy
And yet Hepburn never described Wyler with resentment. She described him with reverence. She credited him with teaching her the one lesson that shaped her entire approach to acting. “I’d say almost everything,” she said of what she owed him. “His attitude was that only simplicity and truth count. It has to come from the inside. You can’t fake it. That is something I long remembered.”
That tension, a director who tested her patience on set but earned her lifelong gratitude off it, ran through all three films they made together: ‘Roman Holiday‘, ‘The Children’s Hour‘, and ‘How to Steal a Million‘. Decades after his death, Hepburn flew across the world to speak about him for a documentary made by his daughter. It was a gesture that said more than any quote could about the debt she felt she owed the one director who never let her get away with anything less than her best.
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