Audrey Hepburn’s Screen Test for Roman Holiday (1953) (via Open Culture)
In his biography of Ms. Hepburn, the author Barry Paris writes:
Her Roman Holiday test took place at Pinewood Studio in London, September 18, 1951, under [Thorold] Dickinson’s direction. “We did some scenes out of the script,” he said, but “Paramount also wanted to see what Audrey was actually like not acting a part, so I did an interview with her. We loaded a thousand feet of film into a camera and every foot of it went on this conversation. She talked about her experiences in the war, the Allied raid on Arnhem, and hiding out in a cellar. A deeply moving thing.”
Later, so the story goes, the director William Wyler watched the footage (shown above) in Rome and found it irresistible. He claimed: “She had everything I was looking for: charm, innocence and talent. She also was very funny. She was absolutely enchanting, and we said, ‘That’s the girl!'”