Gritty realist photographer Bert Hardy captures Audrey Hepburn between takes in starkest black and white – but the elfin charm still shines through

Roland Barthes once remarked that the face of Greta Garbo was an idea, that of Audrey Hepburn an event. The idea, in Garbo's case, was Platonic, a severely abstract dream of perfection. The event or events were the thoughts and emotions that flickered like a magic lantern show across Hepburn's quizzical features. It's never clear whether she is laughing or about to cry, a vulnerable child or an alluring woman. She had, as the musical directed by Stanley Donen proclaims, a uniquely funny face.

Barthes was contrasting essence and existence, and Funny Face is about Hepburn as the embodiment of existentialism, the philosophical doctrine that emphasised our dangerous freedom to make ourselves up as we go along. She plays a sniffy intellectual, discovered by a fashion magazine during a photoshoot in a Greenwich Village bookshop. Fred Astaire is the photographer who persuades her to travel to Paris to model, which she does so that she can sit at the feet of a guru – actually as modish as the designers and stylists she despises – who preaches a nonsensical theory of "basal metabolism" in a Left Bank cabaret, surrounded by jazz-dancing beatniks. It's the same story recently retold in The Devil Wears Prada, though Anne Hathaway is a modern woman who priggishly rejects the temptations offered by Meryl Streep, whereas Hepburn, romanced by Astaire with the help of some Cole Porter songs, happily consents to be beautiful rather than brainy.

Here Hepburn is caught on the street outside her guru's smoky den, joking with the extras between takes. Under her raincoat she is dressed in black, the costume of the self-dramatising existentialists, with her sleeves industriously rolled up. The motor scooter is a streamlined 50s icon: existentialism was about living fast, and its praise of our radical liberty was fuelled, as the cafe table reveals, by cigarettes and drink.

Bert Hardy, a gritty realist who worked for the magazine Picture Post, photographed Hepburn in black and white, without the candy-coloured luminosity Donen turned on for the scenes inside the nightclub. If he thought he was going to demystify her, he was wrong. The elfin funny face is up to its tricks, beaming with mischief. And what precisely is the event? She might be planting her hands on her hips to deliver a stern lecture, or be about to pull a cheeky surprise from her pocket. She needs no gauzes over the lens, and can even dispense with spotlights: she radiates brightness and warmth, making Garbo seem as frigid as the midnight sun. Whatever charisma is – and it means a gift of grace, a supernatural blessing – it has been captured here.

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