Day after day, the shocking
headlines are rolling out of Great Britain, and they don’t have anything to do
with Brexit. Harry and Meghan (last names unnecessary) are giving up their
status as senior royals! They’re planning to spend a good part of their time
overseas (likely in Canada, where Meghan’s grandmother-in-law’s picture is
still on the money)! They want to earn their own living (imagine that!) and
make their own rules! They no long want to be called by their “royal highness”
titles! (I don’t suppose “your royal lowness” is under consideration.)
I’m sure it’s all
heartbreaking for Queen Elizabeth and for fans of British traditionalism, of
which the U.S. has many. From afar it looks like an easy gig to be a royal: you
dress beautifully, visit hospitals, and wave with your fingers stuck together.
But from my brief experience at being a semi-celebrity—when I was one of 56
U.S. pavilion guides at the 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan—I know that it
can prove exhausting to be constantly the center of attention. Good behavior at
all times is hardly natural or easy. And Meghan’s outsider status has certainly
left her wide open to a press that is always on the lookout for snarky scoops.
In any case, the situation
naturally set me to thinking about movies in which young royals chafe under the
pressures they face. Little girls may still want to grow up to be princesses.
(Even, I’m told, William and Kate’s daughter Charlotte has this fantasy,
notwithstanding the fact that she is a princess for real.) The movies,
especially Disney fare like Frozen and the Princess Diaries
franchise, certainly encourage royalty-envy. But the whole situation of a
princess struggling to accept the demands of her royal status takes me back a
long way to 1953, and Audrey Hepburn’s first major film, the delightful Roman
Holiday.
The story of Roman Holiday,
which was filmed on location in the Eternal City, is simplicity itself. The
young Princess Anne, representing some unnamed European country, is on a state
visit to Rome. She’s beautiful and poised . . . and unspeakably bored by all the
pomp and circumstance surrounding her visit. That’s why she sneaks out of her
royal quarters . . . and finds herself in the company of an ambitious reporter,
Gregory Peck, who at first sees in her the potential for a terrific
journalistic coup. Soon, of course, he’s charmed by her innocent delight in
common pleasures, like eating an ice cream cone in public and zooming through
the twisty streets of Rome on a Vespa motorbike. It’s not long before she’s having her long royal
locks shorn into a modern style and gotten herself involved in a good
old-fashioned fracas that prompts the arrival of the carabinieri. And,
of course, she’s come very close to falling in love. The end of the film (as
I’m sure everyone has anticipated) is a return to the basic status quo: Anne is
back doing her royal duty, and Peck’s character is again no more than a member
of the press corps. But while life as a commoner has subtly changed her, her
vibrant enthusiasm has softened Peck’s cynical approach to life. It’s a quietly
happy ending, particularly for Hepburn, who went home with a Best Actress
Oscar.
This movie also won Oscars
for Edith Head’s costumes and for its witty screenplay. The latter statuette
was presented to Ian McLellan Hunter, who was in fact fronting for the
blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. It took forty years for the late Trumbo to be
acknowledged as the film’s true author.
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