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****Spoiler Warning: This post divulges the entire plot of Roman Holiday.
“I will cherish my visit here in memory as long as I live.”*
Audrey Hepburn and I once lived together. And oh the sex we had. Okay, not really, but our existences did overlap for a few years - almost a decade in which it was at least physically possible (if nothing more) for me to be in her presence. There was a stretch of time in which I could have sent her a fan letter (as letters were still written, then) and expected a response - a stretch of time in which we could have been watching the same episode of *Murder She Wrote *or I could have somehow touched her life by some strange stroke of the Butterfly Effect.
But the Audrey Hepburn I fell in love with about 8 seconds into my first viewing of Breakfast at Tiffany’s… we were never even in the same dimension. That Audrey Hepburn was a fever dream even in her own time, distant and impenetrable in a way possible only for our most iconic movie stars. But like all things, she was always more potent as an apparition - a collective reverie that can’t be bottled. And I don’t think there’s a sequence in any of her films that captures the sad and private sweetness of myth and memory better than the ending of William Wyler’s Roman Holiday.