Audrey Hepburn Looks Different Without Her Signature Short Hair

You can't think of Audrey Hepburn without a flash of that short hair coming to mind first. When "Roman Holiday" opened at Radio City Music Hall on August 27, 1953, audiences watched a runaway princess march into a barbershop and ask for all of it to come off. For the next four decades, nobody pictured Hepburn without her pixie cut, and it turned into an inseparable part of that era's aesthetic vocabulary. Hair expert Rachael Gibson says Hepburn is the name most often attached to the pixie's move into the mainstream.

Which is precisely why a long-haired Hepburn is so disorienting. Just look at this image from the set of 1959's "Green Mansions" that features Hepburn with waist-length hair and bangs, designed by MGM's wig department and seamlessly attached it to her crop. The way it's framing her face is interesting. Neither the cheekbones nor the brows have moved, but the weight around the jaw softens ever so slightly and gives her face a rounder quality.

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Hepburn's style was so iconic that Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle both channeled her look on different occasions. What might surprise you is how often she wore her hair long. She turned up as a frontier daughter in "The Unforgiven" and went long and dark in "Green Mansions." She grew her hair out again for "My Fair Lady." And the twist is, the stretch when she wore it longest was the worst run of her career.

Audrey Hepburn headlined "Green Mansions" in 1959, directed by her then-husband Mel Ferrer. In it, she was a barefoot forest girl who talks to birds. Film critic Emanuel Levy noted that "Sporting long black hair, for a change, Hepburn looks lovely, despite the unflattering costumes." And this was a film he otherwise panned outright. Ticket buyers were no kinder, and the movie ended up grossing roughly $2.39 million against a budget of $3.29 million. It was one of the rare money-losers on an otherwise gilded resume.

Then there was "The Unforgiven," starring Hepburn as Rachel Zachary in heavy dark braids. On January 28, 1959, rehearsing a bareback riding scene on location in Durango, Mexico, she was pitched over her horse's head and broke her back. According to biographies, the fall caused her to have a miscarriage. John Huston, the director, ranked it the least satisfying thing he ever made, having spent the entire shoot fighting his backers about the film's handling of racism. It certainly wasn't the Audrey Hepburn movie to catch if you'd never watched one before.

Knowing how she dealt with that explains why Audrey Hepburn's son describes her as a badass. After her miscarriage — which her son Sean Hepburn Ferrer said she counted among the hardest experiences of her life — Hepburn got pregnant again before the year ended. She gave birth to Sean and then returned to finish the movie in a back brace. The long hair may be a reminder of the one period when everything worked against her in the industry, but Hepburn returned confidently to star in movies for another two decades.