Audrey Hepburn in the context of "Ixelles"

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⭐ Core Definition: Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Kathleen Hepburn (née Ruston; 4 May 1929 – 20 January 1993) was a British actress. Recognised as a film and fashion icon, she was ranked by the American Film Institute as the third-greatest female screen legend from the Classical Hollywood cinema. She was inducted into the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame and is one of a few entertainers who have won competitive Academy, Emmy, Grammy and Tony Awards.

Born into an aristocratic family in Ixelles, Brussels, Hepburn spent parts of her childhood in Belgium, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. She attended boarding school in Kent from 1936 to 1939. Hepburn returned to the Netherlands with the Second World War's outbreak. She studied ballet at the Arnhem Conservatory during the war. By 1944, Hepburn was performing ballet to raise money to support the resistance. She studied with Sonia Gaskell in Amsterdam from 1945 to 1948 and then with Marie Rambert in London.

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Audrey Hepburn in the context of British cinema

British cinema has significantly influenced the global film industry since the 19th century. The oldest known surviving film in the world, Roundhay Garden Scene (1888), was shot in England by French inventor Louis Le Prince. Early colour films were also pioneered in the UK. Film production reached an all-time high in 1936, but the "golden age" of British cinema is usually thought to have occurred in the 1940s, which saw the release of the most critically acclaimed works by filmmakers such as David Lean, Michael Powell, and Carol Reed.

Many British actors have accrued critical success and worldwide recognition, including Alec Guinness, Patrick Stewart, Julie Andrews, Michael Caine, Joan Collins, Sean Connery, Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Craig, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Olivia de Havilland, Audrey Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, Glynis Johns, Vivien Leigh, Ian Mckellen, Peter O'Toole, Gary Oldman, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Emma Thompson, Rachel Weisz, Kate Winslet and Keira Knightley. Some of the films with the largest ever box office profits have been made in the United Kingdom, including Harry Potter and James Bond, the fourth and fifth highest-grossing film franchises of all time.

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Audrey Hepburn in the context of Subtitle

Subtitles are texts representing the contents of the audio in a film, television show, opera or other audiovisual media. Subtitles might provide a transcription or translation of spoken dialogue. Although naming conventions can vary, captions are subtitles that include written descriptions of other elements of the audio, like music or sound effects. Captions are thus especially helpful to deaf or hard-of-hearing people. Subtitles may also add information that is not present in the audio. Localizing subtitles provide cultural context to viewers. For example, a subtitle could be used to explain to an audience unfamiliar with sake that it is a type of Japanese wine. Lastly, subtitles are sometimes used for humor, as in Annie Hall, where subtitles show the characters' inner thoughts, which contradict what they were saying in the audio.

Creating, delivering, and displaying subtitles is a complicated and multi-step endeavor. First, the text of the subtitles needs to be written. When there is plenty of time to prepare, this process can be done by hand. However, for media produced in real-time, like live television, it may be done by stenographers or using automated speech recognition. Subtitles written by fans, rather than more official sources, are referred to as fansubs. Regardless of who does the writing, they must include information on when each line of text should be displayed.

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Audrey Hepburn in the context of Aurora (Sleeping Beauty)

Aurora, also known as Sleeping Beauty or Briar Rose, is a fictional character who appears in Disney Animation's 1959 film Sleeping Beauty. Voiced by Mary Costa, Aurora is the only child of King Stefan and Queen Leah. An evil fairy named Maleficent seeks revenge for not being invited to Aurora's christening and curses the newborn princess, foretelling that she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel's spindle and die before sunset on her sixteenth birthday. Merryweather, one of the three good fairies, weakened the curse so Aurora would only sleep. Determined to prevent this, three good fairies raise Aurora as a peasant in order to protect her, patiently awaiting her sixteenth birthday—the day the spell can only be broken by a kiss from her true love, Prince Phillip.

Aurora is based on the princess in Charles Perrault's fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty". Some elements, such as her name, are derived from the ballet The Sleeping Beauty by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.For several years, Walt Disney had struggled to find a suitable actress to voice the princess and nearly abandoned the film entirely until Costa was discovered by composer Walter Schumann. However, Costa's southern accent nearly cost her the role until she proved that she could sustain a British accent for the duration of the film. In order to accommodate the film's unprecedentedly detailed backgrounds, Aurora's refined design demanded more effort than had ever been spent on an animated character before, with the animators drawing inspiration from Art Nouveau. Animated by Marc Davis, Aurora's slender physique was inspired by actress Audrey Hepburn. With 18 lines of dialogue and equally few minutes of screen time, the character speaks less than any speaking main character in a feature-length Disney animated film.

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Audrey Hepburn in the context of Eliza Doolittle

Eliza Doolittle is a fictional character and the protagonist in George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1913) and its 1956 musical adaptation, My Fair Lady.

Eliza (from Lisson Grove, London) is a Cockney flower seller, who comes to Professor Henry Higgins asking for elocution lessons, after a chance encounter at Covent Garden. Higgins goes along with it for the purposes of a wager: That he can turn her into the toast of elite London society. Her Cockney dialect includes words that are common among working class Londoners, such as ain't; "I ain't done nothing wrong by speaking to the gentleman" said Doolittle.

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Audrey Hepburn in the context of My Fair Lady (film)

My Fair Lady is a 1964 American musical comedy drama film adapted from the 1956 Lerner and Loewe stage musical based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 stage play Pygmalion. With a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner and directed by George Cukor, the film depicts a poor Cockney flower-seller named Eliza Doolittle who overhears a phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, as he casually wagers that he could teach her to speak English so well she could pass for a duchess in Edwardian London or better yet, from Eliza's viewpoint, secure employment in a flower store.

The film stars Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle—replacing Julie Andrews from the stage musical—and Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins—reprising his role from the stage musical—with Stanley Holloway, Gladys Cooper and Wilfrid Hyde-White in supporting roles. A critical and commercial success, it became the second-highest-grossing film of 1964 and won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. American Film Institute included the film as #91 in its 1998 AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies, as #12 in its 2002 AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions, and as #8 in its 2006 AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals.

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