“Two for the Road”: Hear italian chanteuse Roberta Gambarini and American Nancy LaMott Perform Henry Mancini and Leslie Bricusse’s song “Two for the Road,” from the eponymous, 1967 movie, and Mancini Play It on the Piano (Three Videos)

By N.S.

Hank Mancini (born Enrico Nicola Mancini in Cleveland, 1924-1994) and Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) had a thing going. Not a sexual thing, to my knowledge, but there was nonetheless a chemistry that bonded these two magical creatures.

Mancini scored no fewer than four Hepburn pictures: Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961); Charade (1963); Two for the Road (1967); and Wait until Dark (also 1967). Mancini was nominated for 18 Oscars, winning four.

That this song was not nominated, I take to mean that the picture did poorly at the box office. At the time, Mancini was considered the gold standard in movie music, who wrote “adult” music (before “adult” became a euphemism for pornography), though he had serious rivals in Elmer Bernstein and Jerry Goldsmith. Mancini also composed the music for several Julie Andrews (1935-) pictures. The nexus in such instances was Andrews’ husband, director-screenwriter-producer Blake Edwards (1922-2010). I’ve heard so much of Two for the Road, the movie, that I might as well have seen it. A couple (Hepburn and Albert Finney, 1936-2019), whose marriage is on the rocks, take their annual vacation drive through the South of France, and as they do, recollect a marriage of such drives, accompanied by Mancini’s score.

Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021) was nominated for ten Oscars, winning two.


Roberta Gambarini (age unknown—she engages in a woman’s traditional prerogative, of giving widely varying years of birth to different interlocutors)




Nancy LaMott (1951-1995)




“Henry Mancini performing ‘Two for the Road’ on Parkinson on January 9th 1982”