The News Journal from Wilmington, Delaware • Page 47

Thursday, Jan. 21, 1993 Section I HOME CONSUMER TELEVISION MOVIES COMICS Princess who believed in fairy tales AUDREY HEPBURN The News Journal, Wilmington, Del. vF few 1 GARY MULLINAX Guitar masters reveal different voices in concert WILMINGTON Classical guitarist Eliot Fisk plays concerts filled with music by composers like Bach and Paganini. But he always believes people more accustomed to i a 'x. trilMifTitiMt- -1 -i'i I 'in i i hi' V-' SBB music by Pat Metheny or Eric Clapton are in the audience.

"If you walk on stage with a guitar," Fisk said, "people who might not otherwise be positively inclined toward classical music think, 'Oh, that's a The thought makes him happy, because Fisk believes that many traditional fans of classical music "are snobs and afraid to show emotion. In a way I feel like I'm playing for the wrong class." Fisk, who will perform Tuesday at the Grand Opera House, is a self-described "wild man" among classical guitarists, though the term is relative and nobody should expect some latter-day Jimi Hendrix. But even Christopher Parkening, whose more conservative style on classical guitar will be reflected in his Grand concert March 1, notes with satisfaction the crossover ability of the instrument, so familiar to audiences for jazz and rock. He first noticed it at concerts by Andres Segovia, the guitar master who taught both men and helped make them two of the foremost performers in their field. "The audience was always made up of a potpourri of different kinds of people," said Parkening, who is 45 to Fisk's 38.

"Always included were the younger generation, who I'm sure listened to everything from jazz to rock 'n' roll." Fisk's adventurousness includes performing work by contemporary composers such as Nicolas Maw, who wrote a "monumental solo work" for him. He will perform it at the Grand and only one other time An actress of haunting beauty and regal bearing, Audrey Hepburn died Wednesday in Switzerland. Her presence has charmed moviegoers for 40 years by bringing a sense of class and sophistication to roles from "My Fair Lady" to "Roman Holiday." By MICHAEL McWILLIAMS The Detroit News Audrey Hepburn was the fairest lady of them all. Hepburn, whose 40-year film career gave regality a new meaning, died Wednesday in Switzerland at age 63. Hepburn, the goodwill ambassador for the United Nation's Children's Fund, had undergone colon cancer surgery last year.

Dubbed "the Princess" by Frank Sinatra, Hepburn was indeed of royal lineage: Her mother was a baroness. But the Belgian-born Dutch-Irish star, born Edda van Heem-stra Hepburn-Ruston on May 4, 1929, was the kind of royal you see only in fairy tales, where sleeping beauties are awakened by the kisses of princes, where ugly ducklings are transformed into swans and where glass slippers are passports to worlds of unspeakable splendor. The titles of Hepburn's films alone resonate with romantic incandescence: "Roman Holiday," "Love in the Afternoon," "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "My Fair Lady," "Two for the Road." What Hepburn brought to these classics wasn't just a waiflike innocence, but a haunting and ironic melancholy, an understanding that love is especially elusive for the lonely. "I'm a very interior person," Hepburn once said. As a sickly teen-ager in Nazi-occupied Holland, Hepburn nearly starved to death.

Dreaming of becoming a ballerina, she made it to England after the war and became a chorus girl. Bit parts in films followed, until French author Colette spotted Hepburn offered her the lead in Broadway's Gigi. "I can't act," protested Hepburn. Get over it, suggested Colette. Within two years, Hepburn won a Tony for Ondine and an Oscar for her first starring role in a movie William Wyler's "Roman Holiday" (1953) about a frustrated princess who goes incognito in Rome and falls in love with a newspaperman (Gregory Peck).

Hepburn was 24. "I'm no Laurence Olivier, no virtuoso talent," Hepburn had said. "I'm basically rather inhibited. I find it difficult to do things in front of people. What my directors have had in common is that they've made me feel secure." Wyler, a notorious taskmaster, broke through Hepburn's repressions, forcing her to cry during a crucial 'scene in "Roman Holiday," and she thanked him for it afterward.

"I never thought of myself as a beauty," she once recalled. Her private life reflected a similar need for security: a 14-year marriage to actor Mel Ferrer, which produced a son, Sean; and a second, nine-year marriage to Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, which gave her another son, Luca. In later years, Hepburn dedicated herself to charity work for UNICEF, touring ravaged areas, most recently in Somalia, where she fell ill. In March she will be bestowed the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at the Academy Awards. She shared her private life with Robert Wolders in a Swiss farmhouse overlooking Lake Geneva, where she tended roses, like Eliza Dolittle in "My Fair Lady." That is, in a way, how we imagine Audrey Hepburn: in a place where beauty reigns, where solitude is the prerogative of royalty, the essence of legends.

"If I'm honest, I have to tell you I still read fairy tales," she once said, "and I like them the best of all." All photos AP Audrey Hepburn, in costume for her role In "My Fair Lady" (1964) brought to the screen a haunting and ironic melancholy, an understanding that love Is especially elusive (or the lonely. "I'm a very interior person," Hepburn said. As a sickly teen-ager in Nazi-held Holland, Hepburn nearly starved to death. She made it to England and became a chorus girl. I) Gentle giant triuimphs at last Stricken boy became spirited actor on this tour, in Washington, lsk also will play from the relatively extensive Spanish repertoire.

So will Parkening, who will add pieces by Bach and other composers. Parkening and others praise Fisk for his extraordinary technique. Fisk describes his counterpart's style as "more restricted." Parkening, as soft-spoken as Fisk is cheerfully outspoken, acknowledges that his playing is relatively restrained. "I would hope that the audience would appreciate the music for its sake rather than the presentation of it," he said by telephone from his home in California. Not two peas in a pod Parkening, a devout Christian, also said his "primary objective is to glorify the Lord with my life and the music I play." Here, too, Fisk takes a different approach.

"He seems to be on some sort of religious bent, and I abhor anything like that," Fisk said on the telephone from New York. "I see the horrors done in the name of fundamentalist, organized religion and it makes me puke." The guitarists even look as different as they sound. Parkening has stylishly coiffed hair and classically handsome, almost delicate, features. Fisk has a more rough-hewn face and wears glasses. He looks like a pugnacious intellectual.

Parkening lives with his wife in a Los Angeles suburb where horse trails run next to the streets. Fisk makes his primary home in Salzburg, Austria, with his wife and daughter. But he wants to move back to cosmopolitan Cologne in Germany. "It's rather repressive in Salzburg; we don't find much resistance to authority." But the two share a reverence for Segovia. For Parkening, who first studied with him in 1964, that reverence is tinged with awe.

He recalls seeing Segovia's response to a student who had the nerve to play a bad transcription of a Bach piece that Segovia himself had transcribed for guitar. "Segovia let him play the piece, and when he was finished he pointed to the door and told him, 'Leave Fisk first met Segovia in 1974. "Parkening knew him earlier; when I met him he was a lot nicer." Both also praise the guitar for being one of the few instruments that can command the stage by itself. But, typically, it is Fisk who also notes the instrument's drawbacks. "You have to worry about your fingernails breaking all the time, he said.

"And the wood is so thin it reacts hysterically to humidity changes. You don't know what instrument you're going to have when you get to the concert." Gary Mullinax is a staff writer. Ilk vLa -yi I 9 By RHONDA B.GRAHAM Stall reporter WILMINGTON Twenty-four years ago, Mark Taylor often resided in pediatric hospitals, on wards for the terminally ill. A rare form of epilepsy bombarded the 4-year-old with three seizures per episode, destroying brain cells each time. As a last resort to life-long institutionalization, frustrated doctors recommended a four-year-long ketogenic diet.

"It's basically a starvation-type diet. A lunch would consist of three grapes and a lot of mayonnaise," Taylor recalls. But as he tap dances across the stage of the Delaware Children's Theater production of "Jack and the Beanstalk" this weekend, there's nary a trace of his childhood affliction. Originally, the disease threatened the Milltown youth intellectually, causing him to score low on standardized tests. Only the Pilot School admitted him.

Taylor assimilated into public schools at the sixth-grade level, but was kept back a year to help him adjust from an average class of six to 30 students. He eventually made it through Skyline Junior High, then on to Dickinson High before transferring to St. Mark's High School, where he had a definitive experience. He discovered the theater and that he could sing. While a theater major at West Chester State University, an agent booked him for regional TV commercials.

His proudest moment is the time he was understudy to actor Barry Bostwick during a CBS 20-minute tribute to the U.S. Constitution. Actor Lloyd Bridges wrote in the rehearsal script that Taylor was ready for bigger roles. In addition to flying to Nashville, and Los Angeles to record a country music album, Taylor also tends bar and sings at the Wilmington Country Club. Last fall, he was Johnny Brown in the Three Little Bakers' production of "The Un- Mark Taylor found a haven in acting.

sinkable Molly Brown" and the Beast for the children's theater version of "Beauty and the Beast." His latest role is a soft twist on the time-honored tradition of fairy tale ogres. "This guy's kind of nice. He has a little edge to him, but not nearly the edge the old giant does. This giant even tap dances with the golden goose. I also tango," Taylor says.

Children make critical audiences, and are by far the most honest. "But that's OK. I like honesty" Taylor says. And he likes kids, although the 29-year-old actor has none. "I kind of rationalize that I really didn't have a typical childhood.

My being involved in theater in a way is making up for lost time, because it really is like playing." s' What: "Jack and the Beanstalk'' When: 1:30 p.m. Saturday, Sunday, Jan. 30, 31, Feb. 6 and 4 p.m. Sunday and Jan.

31 Where: Delaware Children's Theater, 1014 Delaware Wilmington Information: Call 655-1014 Tickets: $8 The News JournalBRIAN PRICE Art Sennett (left) Is the giant's assistant Mark Taylor Is the giant, and Jeremy DiPinto is Jack In "Jack and thl Beanstalk.".