There have been many great films with many great actors and actresses throughout several years of film making and entertaining. In order to make so many brilliant films, actors and actresses were auditioned to fit the role of the character like a glove to a ball player. These schooled or naturally talented men and women gained a part not only due to their ability to act but, also their personal or exceptional understanding of the role in the work of art they were about to help create.
Though there were many outstanding men and women entertaining, there were two films that could be noticeable to the natural observer that included two remarkable leading ladies, Audrey Hepburn in George Cukor's 1964 My Fair Lady and Jane Fonda in Joseph Losey's 1973 A Doll's House. The characters these two great women played were intricate and emotionally complex.
Not only were the characters personality and manners solid, the actress themselves were already had parts of their personality that would have been like a reincarnate of the characters. An audience would have the best of both worlds when watching these two films, two actresses that portrayed a part of themselves in real life on the big screen.
What could best explain for such descriptive women playing descriptive characters would also be the fact that both of these films not meant to be films. My Fair Lady was actually written as a play, Pygmalion, in 1913 and A Doll's House was written as a play in 1879 by Henrik Ibsen.
Since originating from a more literary and thorough form, the way the characters are described in either a play format or a book format have to be written in a way that either the audience could see on a one-set stage the emotion the character displays or the reader could read the emotion the character feels inside. Hence these complex characters need complex and well-rounded actresses to flourish on the stage or screen.
To further assist the explanation in the film, My Fair Lady, Audrey Hepburn plays the leading lady role of Eliza who went from a beseeching, aggravating, harsh dialect flower girl to a suitable, pleasurably speaking "Hungarian Princess." The character went through a few effects that displayed her complex character performed by an amazing actress. One such complexity was that is highly noticeable and most of the character's growth was the overall change in lifestyle and personality.
From the very get-go an audience could observe the harsh conditions in which the girl lived in. Her very surroundings were disgusting, but that did not mean her future was to be such. She was a flower, like her being a flower girl was not irony, amongst a bunch of weeds, until one day a man of class and genius takes her in and transformed her into the beautiful blossom she was fashioned to be.
Audrey Hepburn herself was already a beautiful woman with wondrous talent, which she contributed to the character. For example, after the character had been taught for a few months, her educators[, Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) and Colonel Pickering (Wilfred Hyde-White), thought her to be ready for a public appearance, which turned out to be at the races. She did well until she had a moment of outburst and emotion and yelled, "…move your blooming ass!"
Naturally, the rest of the characters and an audience would be surprised, thinking she should have known better than to say something such as that despite all of the intense training and educating she had drudged through. But, what is awesome about the character and that moment is the ability that the actresses could allow the character naturally flows back into her old habits. It was a like a sudden burst of lightening and then bam, back to the old habits.
Audrey Hepburn was a keen, ideal actresses for this role, not only for her abilities to sing (although mainly dubbed by Marni Nixon here), dance, and to be naturally beautiful, but also for] her very diverse talents seen in her others films. She was indeed a well-rounded, complex actress that has the ability to apply characters to her persona.
Not only was Audrey Hepburn, for her time, very amazing, later on in the years, Jane Fonda was able to hold her own and develop herself as an actress. In the movie, A Doll's House, Jane Fonda plays the role of the leading lady who had married a man that very much manly and overpowering because he treated his lovely "tweet mouse" of a wife like a child.
Jane Fonda's wife character is similar in some ways to Audrey Hepburn's character in the fact that both have major transitions in their lives, which allow for their complex characters. Fonda's wife role begins with her history or past going behind her husband's back when he was sick to get a loan to take him to Italy so he would not die. Then the film transitions to the present with the wife character having three children and being the merry homemaker to the soon-to-be bank president husband.
Throughout the many years, the husband had no clue about the loan that his wife had obtained by forging the signature of her dead father on the necessary document presented by Krogstad (Edward Fox). Since her husband, who was the upcoming president of the bank, was going to fire him, as an old adversary, Krogstad threatened the wife that he would expose her to the husband if the husband were to cost him his job.
Due to the wife's home circumstance and the way her husband treated her when he learned the truth, she decided that she had to learn how to fend for herself and to discover who she was and what her station in life was to be. Fonda's character eventually gathered the nerve and confidence to confront her husband about the loan and the way he had been treating her all these years. The moment she confronted her husband was the breaking point for the character and Jane Fonda's moment to display a natural part of her on screen.
Basically, the wife informed the husband how it was going to be from then on in the family and with her life, which would not include him or the children. The transformation could almost be awesome to an audience who had thought the husband would just get angry and then just start treating her like a child again because she did not know any better, but that was quite the opposite.
After the wife had drilled into the husband, she informed him that she did not need him for a while and had to fend for herself and then exited the house through front door, which she slammed, leaving the husband absolutely speechless. At this point, Jane Fonda totally displayed a part of her self and complimented the character perfectly.
Jane Fonda is naturally an independent, vocal actress. She makes up her own mind and does her own thing. A great example, other than her acting career, that best displays her confidence about herself was during the Vietnam War and her outcry against it. Naturally, that was a controversial time and having an actress or just someone as famous such as she commenting on an event such as that, was not expected, but she did it anyway and went along her merry little way.
Jane Fonda used her natural born fierceness for the role and displayed it well, as did Audrey Hepburn for her role. There were and are many great roles, many great men and women played. Audrey Hepburn and Jane Fonda (despite her poor political voice), will be regarded and remember as great contributors to film and in the their films that were discussed, as great well-rounded, intricate chicks for complex characters.