Audrey Hepburn Hand-Picked James Coburn For Charade's Most Maniacal Role
I miss movie stars. We have so few people left that you could put their name and face on a poster, and that is enough to sell a movie. The ones we do still have come from generations earlier, and even still, someone like Tom Cruise needs to lean on "Top Gun" or "Mission: Impossible" to guarantee people go see his movies. I don't love them for the gossip and celebrity of the movie star status. I love movie stars because they have a preternatural understanding of how to command the camera, and when they are in movies, you cannot take your eyes off them. And when they're paired together, that's the sweet spot.
Take Stanley Donen's fabulous comic thriller "Charade," which stars two of the greatest movie stars to ever grace the silver screen: Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. Yes, their age difference is concerning, but the two have unparalleled megawatt charisma that you can't help but fall in love with them. Putting those names above the title makes "Charade" the glamorous must-watch that it is, but a massively underrated part of the film is the names below the title, which features a trio of phenomenal actors who you're never disappointed to see in a film: Walter Matthau, George Kennedy, and James Coburn.
Coburn, in particular, stands out to me. His presence in "Charade" was downright unsettling, as he was usually known to be such a cool guy on-screen. However, this performance came fairly early into Coburn's film career, having been mostly a guest star on TV shows for the decade before it. He was a Westerns and war guy, not someone you'd normally think of to put in a film like "Charade." Luckily for him, he had a champion in a high place. He had Audrey Hepburn.
'How do you thank somebody for doing that?'
In "Charade," James Coburn plays Tex, one of the three men after the missing gold at the center of the film — and he's one menacing son of a gun. One scene in particular, where he traps Audrey Hepburn's character in a phone booth and starts dropping lit matches onto her, is particularly unsettling. In an industry of typecasting, there wasn't much in his short filmography to signal that kind of threat from Coburn. But Hepburn saw something in him.
In the biography "Audrey Hepburn" by Barry Paris, Coburn recounted how he got the gig and credited it all to Hepburn. On set one day, she asked him if he knew how he got the part, and he didn't, to which she replied, "I saw you in 'The Magnificent Seven' ... and I told Stanley Donen — he's our Tex!" In "The Magnificent Seven," Coburn's character Britt is the ultimate quiet badass, particularly with a knife in his hand. It was only Coburn's third film, but it showed he had that ineffable movie star thing so many wish they had. The same level of menace isn't really in "The Magnificent Seven," but that commanding presence certainly is.
Coburn was very grateful to Hepburn for the job: "How do you thank somebody for doing that? 'Thanks, Baby.' It was her suggestion. If it had been up to Stanley, he never would have hired me." That very well might have been true. I could see Stanley Donen going for either a more glamorous choice or wildly pivoting to someone completely out of left field. James Coburn was the perfect Tex. Not only did Audrey Hepburn have good taste in projects and fashion, but she apparently had it in recognizing talent too.