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By the time they appeared together in Stanley Donen’s delightful comedy-mystery-thriller Charade in 1963, the incomparably handsome Cary Grant had already turned down three opportunities (Roman Holiday, Sabrina, and Love in the Afternoon) to work with his beautiful co-star, Audrey Hepburn. Born in 1904, Grant was a quarter of a century older than Hepburn, born in 1929, and he was acutely conscious of the age difference between them. But no one could combine romantic comedy with the thriller genre better than they could, and the result was one of the outstanding films in both of their brilliant careers. This lecture will examine how these two great actors, starting with traumatic childhoods in Europe, became the most charming Hollywood stars of their respective eras.
Bruce Thompson is a lecturer in the Departments of History and Literature and the Associate Director of Jewish Studies at U.C.-Santa Cruz, and also teaches at the Institute. He received his Ph.D. in History from Stanford; his areas of scholarly research include European intellectual and cultural history, French history, British Isles history, American Jewish intellectual and cultural history, the history of cinema, and the history of espionage.
