Marianne Gray

Breakfast at Tiffany’s: the official 50th Anniversary Companion

It hardly feels like 50 years ago that Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly tripped her way into cinematic folklore on her journey to become a timeless icon. In her little Givenchy black dress and long cigarette holder, Holly has endured dramatically and improbably. But then, the Holly Golightly’s of this world are improbable girls to begin with.

In this good-looking coffee table book, written in association with Paramount Pictures and the Audrey Hepburn Estate, Sarah Gristwood tells the often fascinating, turbulent back-story of how Truman Capote’s controversial 1958 novella of the same name about a hooker heroine was bought for a ‘then-princely’ $65,000, by Paramount and Capote’s Holly, a poor and perishable girl ‘on the make’, was knocked into palatable shape for the screen.

Scriptwriter George Axelrod, a sometime playwright and producer who’d started out writing forty jokes a week for Grand Ole Opry, was paid $100,000 and made her a ‘kook’ rather than a call-girl

For this great role of darkness, girlishness and glamour, many actresses were mooted – from Jane Fonda to Shirley MacLaine, Rosemary Clooney and others.

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