Roman Holiday at 70: Audrey Hepburn’s star-making role remains luminous

The 1953 romantic comedy may lack heft but the Oscar-winner’s charming lead turn makes it an escape worth taking again

When Roman Holiday was released, 70 summers ago, the monarchy was having a fashionable moment. Two months before, the world had watched the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, a relatively young, glamorous face for a fusty institution: the first such event to be globally televised, it made the very principle of royalty seem less like the realm of ancient history. I say “relatively”: the frilly pomp and ceremony of English royalty can’t have been much sexier in 1953 than it was in 2023, though at least they didn’t have official broad-bean quiche to contend with.

There was certainly ample scope for Hollywood to prettify the notion a bit, which is where Roman Holiday proved most fortuitously timed. A romantic comedy that set a quasi-fantasy template for the genre that has endured to the modern era – take Notting Hill, a veritable homage – it played on a mid-century fascination with real-world princesses, with all the duller formalities taken out. Its protagonist, crown princess Ann, is a blank slate on to which any number of princessy ideals could be projected: she’s beautiful, gracious and charismatic, with an all-purpose Euro glamour that can’t be tied to any specific identity, since the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo had elected to make her from a vague imaginary nation. Beside her, England’s young new queen looked positively, rain-soddenly drab.

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