Fox’s Two for the Road, the most ambitious of the Hepburn-Donen pictures, is a smart, humorous, and touching examination of a marriage. For her love interest, Albert Finney, an age-appropriate actor (actually seven years Hepburn’s junior), was cast. Finney may have caused a sensation as the adorably roguish title character in Tom Jones (1963), but he was also one of the key “angry young men” of 1960s British films. The opposites-attract spark in his teaming with Hepburn is a product of their antithetical styles. She was a movie star who could act; he has never been a personality performer. I’ve always contended that Hepburn’s finest performance is in Fred Zinnemann’s extraordinary drama The Nun’s Story (1959), so I’d like to claim her work in Two for the Road as her next best. These two performances make intriguing companion pieces since, in the former, her acting strength comes from her containment—the tensions in her internal conflicts—whereas in the later film her effectiveness derives from her looseness and spontaneity. In Two for the Road, her character makes the transition from the 1950s Audrey Hepburn, the winsome ugly-duckling beauty, to the 1960s model, who’s more complex by virtue of having lived and loved. That she is convincing as both, within the same film, is a tribute to her underappreciated capabilities.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
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