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Lily Collins, the star of Netflix hit Emily in Paris, has been cast to play Audrey Hepburn in a new film about the making of her 1961 romantic comedy Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
The as-yet-untitled film will be based on Sam Wasson’s nonfiction book Fifth Avenue, 5 AM: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the Dawn of the Modern Woman, with a script written by Alena Smith, creator of the Apple TV series Dickinson. No director has been announced yet.
Collins, the daughter of musician Phil Collins, shared her excitement in a statement on Instagram.
“It’s with almost 10 years of development and a lifetime of admiration and adoration for Audrey that I’m finally able share this,” she wrote. “Honoured and ecstatic don’t begin to express how I feel … ”
Breakfast at Tiffany’s was initially a novella by Truman Capote, published in 1958. Set in the 1940s, the story is narrated by a struggling writer who moves into a new apartment in New York and befriends his glamorous neighbour Holly Golightly, an “American geisha” who gets by socialising with wealthy men.
The 1961 film was a very loose adaptation of Capote’s book, transposing the story to 1960 and turning the novella’s unnamed gay narrator into a straight man who falls in love with Golightly.
Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play Golightly and lobbied the studio, Paramount, to hire her, but Monroe was under contract with Twentieth Century Fox at the time. She was reportedly advised to pass because the character would be bad for her image, with her acting coach, Paula Strasberg, saying: “Marilyn Monroe will not play a lady of the evening.”
Shirley MacLaine and Kim Novak both turned the role down, and Hepburn was cast against Capote’s wishes. “Paramount double-crossed me in every way and cast Audrey,” he later complained. “It was the most miscast film I’ve ever seen.”
Ahead of the film’s release, Paramount’s publicity department desperately attempted to reframe Golightly as being as far from a sex worker as could be. “Since Miss Audrey Hepburn has never played any part that has suggested she was anything but pure, polite and possibly a princess, a hard look at Miss Golightly is in order,” one press release read. Another read: “The star is Audrey Hepburn, not Tawdry Hepburn.”
Breakfast at Tiffany’s received critical acclaim, making US$14m at the global box office – around $152m today – and winning two Academy Awards: best score for composer Henry Mancini and best song for Moon River, performed by Hepburn in the film.
The upcoming movie starring Collins will be the “first complete account of the making of the film” and will cover drama from preproduction to on-set disasters, such as when one crew member was reportedly nearly electrocuted during the film’s famous opening sequence outside the flagship Tiffany & Co store on Fifth Avenue.
Casting for other characters in the film, including Capote and Breakfast at Tiffany’s director Blake Edwards, have yet to be announced.
Hepburn has previously been played by Jennifer Love Hewitt in the 2000 TV movie The Audrey Hepburn Story. Rooney Mara was briefly attached to a Hepburn biopic directed by Luca Guadagnino, but it was called off in 2023.
