All that being said, it’s actually Hollywood costumer Edith Head, not Givenchy, who conceived the elegant, prim confection Hepburn wore to collect her only Academy Award. Audrey can be seen in the original look in the final scene of Roman Holiday, when Princess Ann greets the world’s press in the Palazzo Colonna gallery. By the 26th Academy Awards, however, Hepburn’s tastes had evolved, and she had the dress reimagined, ditching its lantern sleeves and adding a bateau neckline but keeping the belted circle skirt. As Kerry Taylor auctions, which sold the dress for £70,000 in 2011, noted at the time: “The basic dress was an Edith Head creation, but the new bodice cut straight across at the front [and] plunging low at the back with pretty spaghetti straps was undoubtedly inspired by the gowns she had been wearing by her beloved Givenchy.”
In her dressing room at the Century that historic night in 1954, a hurried Audrey slipped the reworked dress on, added the diamond and pearl earrings she wore as Princess Ann for “luck”, then tiptoed into the auditorium with Ferrer. Perched next to her mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, who had just flown in from London, Hepburn sat biting her nails as the ceremony wore on. When actor Donald O’Connor finally announced her as the Best Actress winner, she was so stunned she was close to tears, darting up to accept her statuette perhaps a little too quickly. The overwhelmed 24 year old soon took a wrong turn, and ended up in the wings of the theatre instead of onstage with emcee Jean Hersholt. A born performer, she delivered a self-deprecating, comic frown to much appreciative laughter. “It’s too much,” she said in her sing-song tones when she finally made it to the podium’s microphone. “I’m truly, truly grateful, and terribly happy.” So deliriously happy, in fact, that she later misplaced her statuette amongst the chaos that followed. In the end, it turned up in the ladies’ room of the NBC Century Theatre – and was restored to its owner in time for her Paramount press conference the following morning, where she posed surrounded by hundreds of congratulatory telegrams.
