Princess Anne embarks on a highly publicized tour of Europian capitals. When she and her royal entourage arrive in Rome, she begins to rebel against her restricted, regimented schedule. One night Anne sneaks out of her room, hops into the back of a delivery truck and escapes her luxurious confinement. However, a sedative she was forced to take earlier starts to take effect, and the princess is soon fast asleep on a public bench. She is found by Joe Bradley, an American newspaper reporter stationed in Rome. He takes her back to his apartment. The next morning...

Princess Anne embarks on a highly publicized tour of Europian capitals. When she and her royal entourage arrive in Rome, she begins to rebel against her restricted, regimented schedule. One night Anne sneaks out of her room, hops into the back of a delivery truck and escapes her luxurious confinement. However, a sedative she was forced to take earlier starts to take effect, and the princess is soon fast asleep on a public bench. She is found by Joe Bradley, an American newspaper reporter stationed in Rome. He takes her back to his apartment. The next morning Joe dashes off to cover the Princess Anne press conference, unaware that she is sleeping on his couch! Once he realizes his good fortune, Joe promises his editor an exclusive interview with the princess.

When filming the scene where the princess (Audrey Hepburn) says her goodbyes to Joe, the inexperienced Hepburn was unable to produce the necessary tears, eventually causing director William Wyler to complain at the number of wasted takes. Hepburn promptly burst into tears and the scene was filmed successfully.

For the famous "Mouth of Truth" scene, Gregory Peck ad-libbed the joke where he pretends that his hand was bitten off in the mouth of the stone carving. He borrowed the gag from...

When filming the scene where the princess (Audrey Hepburn) says her goodbyes to Joe, the inexperienced Hepburn was unable to produce the necessary tears, eventually causing director William Wyler to complain at the number of wasted takes. Hepburn promptly burst into tears and the scene was filmed successfully.

For the famous "Mouth of Truth" scene, Gregory Peck ad-libbed the joke where he pretends that his hand was bitten off in the mouth of the stone carving. He borrowed the gag from Red Skelton. Prior to filming the scene, Peck told director William Wyler that he was going to do the gag, but that they should not tell Audrey Hepburn. When Peck pulled his arm out of the stone carving's mouth with his hand pulled up his sleeve, Hepburn's horror and surprise was genuine. She gave what she later recalled was "a good and proper scream," and the scene was finished in one take.

After filming, Gregory Peck informed the producers that, as Audrey Hepburn was certainly going to win an Oscar (for this, her first major role), they had better put her name above the title. They did and she did.

William Wyler at first wanted Jean Simmons to play Ann, and reportedly nearly canceled the project when Simmons proved unavailable.

Audrey Hepburn won the role of Ann thanks to a legendary screen test. In it, she performed one of the scenes from the film, but the cameraman was instructed to keep the cameras rolling after the director said, "Cut." Several minutes of unrehearsed, spontaneous Hepburn was thus captured on film and this, combined with some candid interview footage, won her the role.

The original writer, Dalton Trumbo, was blacklisted as one of the legendary Hollywood Ten, and therefore could not receive credit for the screenplay, even when it won the Academy Award for Best Screenplay. Instead, his friend, Ian McLellan Hunter, took credit for the story and accepted the Oscar. Trumbo's wife, Cleo, was finally presented with the award in 1993, long after his death in 1976. The Oscar she received was actually a second one, because Hunter's son wouldn't give up his father's Oscar. Thus, two awards for Best Screenplay of 1953 exist. The story credit was corrected to credit Trumbo when the restored edition was released in 2002, nearly fifty years after the original release.

By the time he got the script for this film, Gregory Peck was hungry to do a comedy (he had not been in a comedy on film) and jumped at this opportunity. He later said that, at the time, he felt like every romantic comedy script he had the chance to read "had the fingerprints of Cary Grant on it".

At the beginning of the movie, the elder gentleman dancing with princess Ann says to her, in Italian: "I want absolutely to die on the ship!"

The story was originally optioned by Frank Capra in 1949, who had hoped to cast Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor in what would essentially amount to being a variation on his Oscar-winning classic,
It Happened One Night (1934). However, Capra's Liberty Films production company was beset with financial problems and he was forced to sell the property to Paramount where a combination of political timidity (Capra discovered the involvement of blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo) and a tight budget prompted him to withdraw from the project. William Wyler however had no compunctions whatsoever about working with Trumbo.

George Stevens was the next director to inherit the project after Frank Capra bailed, but Stevens declined to pursue it. The property was then offered to William Wyler, who was coming off the back of two very weighty dramatic movies -
The Heiress (1949) and
Detective Story (1951) - and was only too glad to tackle a light romantic comedy, his first since the mid 1930s. Wyler was also very keen to work abroad in order to exploit a tax loophole.

Paramount had assets frozen in Italy and was delighted to take advantage of the opportunity to film in Rome.

Gregory Peck's role was originally written with Cary Grant in mind. Grant, however, turned the role down as he believed he was too old to play Audrey Hepburn's love interest. He did however play her on-screen love ten years later in
Charade (1963). The two became firm friends working on the film, and Grant considered her one of his favorite actresses to work with.

With a budget of about $1.5 million, the film took $5 million in the domestic market.

Shot in black and white so that the characters wouldn't be upstaged by the romantic setting of Rome.

The first American film to be made in its entirety in Italy.

The Roman summer was stiflingly hot, with the temperatures in the high 90s. Crowds swarmed over all the locations, making huge impromptu audiences for the actors. Meanwhile, Italy itself was beset with clashes between political parties that resulted in strikes and unrest that threatened to disrupt production.

The Embassy Ball sequence featured real Italian nobility, who all donated their salaries to charity. The reporters at the end of the film were real too.

When Gregory Peck came to Italy to shoot the movie, he was privately depressed about his recent separation and imminent divorce from his first wife, Greta. However, during the shot he met and fell in love with a French woman named Veronique Passani. After his divorce, he married Passani and they remained together for the rest of his life.

Gregory Peck was initially reluctant to take on a part that was clearly secondary to the young female lead until he realized that his image could do with some lightening up.

First choices for the part of the princess were Jean Simmons and Suzanne Cloutier. Elizabeth Taylor was also considered for the part. Both Taylor and Simmons had to be immediately ruled out as they were preoccupied with other projects at the time.

A lot of the film's success was attributed to the public's then fascination with Britain's Princess Margaret who was creating a stir over her much publicized relationship with commoner Peter Townsend. (The Princess was forced to renounce her true love because he was divorced and marry more "suitably".)

One of the reasons why William Wyler was anxious to film in Europe was because he wanted to put some distance between himself and the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was threatening to embroil him in their investigations because of his liberal stance.

Both Ben Hecht and Preston Sturges are said to have been script doctors on the project.

At the end of production, Paramount Studios presented Audrey Hepburn with her entire wardrobe from the film, including hats, shoes, handbags, and jewelry. These gifts were intended as wedding presents; however, soon after production, Hepburn ended her engagement to James Hanson.

Ann and Joe get into an argument over which poet wrote the words that Ann quotes, "Arethusa rose from her couch of snows in the Acroceraunian mountains." Joe was right; it's from the poem "Arethusa" by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The sheet of paper Hennessy (Hartley Power) reads the interview questions from is actually a page of the script.

[June Ranked 4 on the American Film Institute's list of the 10 greatest films in the genre "Romantic Comedy".

Paramount originally wanted to shoot this movie in Hollywood. William Wyler refused, insisting it must be shot on location. They finally agreed, but with a much lower budget. This meant the movie would now be in Black-n-White, not the expected Technicolor, and he would need to cast an unknown actress as the Princess - Audrey Hepburn.

Audrey Hepburn won the 1953 Best Actress Academy Award for
Roman Holiday (1953). On March 25th, 1954, she accepted the award from the much revered Academy president Jean Hersholt. After accepting the award, Audrey kissed him smack on the mouth, instead of the cheek, in her excitement. Minutes after accepting her 1953 Oscar, Audrey realized that she'd misplaced it. Turning quickly on the steps of the Center Theater in New York, she raced back to the ladies' room, retrieved the award, and was ready to pose for photographs.

The airplane in which the Secret Service men arrive to search for Princess Ann is a very unusual type, the Breda-Zappata BZ.308, of which only one prototype was built in 1949 (for the Italian Air Force). It was scrapped shortly after its appearance in the movie.