Audrey Hepburn: Always a Star

It's one of the ironies of show business that when Audrey Hepburn came out of retirement to return to the screen, it was opposite Sean Connery in the 1976 Robin and Marian; now, she's back again, this time not as Connery's co-star-but as his replacement-in Steven Spielberg's Always.

Sitting on a stone beach in Rome's Piazza Navona, the star of such films as My Fair Lady, Breakfast at Tiffany's and Charade gives an effusive reading of a stock answer when asked how she liked working with Spielberg: "It's wonderful that he's making the sort of films we all used to enjoy, about grownups in unusual circumstances." What about the fact that her character was played by Lionel Barrymore in the first version of this story, the 1943 A Guy Named Joe? "The work should speak for itself," she demurs. At age 60, Hepburn has little use for those who would canonize her, as either a surviving Hollywood star of, latterly, as a UNICEF activist. She protests, "I'm not all goodness and light. I do believe in accentuating the positive- we must, in the unkind world that we seem to be living in. But I promise you, I'm far from perfect ... I can even swear in ltalian!"