THERE ARE a whole fleet of adjectives commonly used to describe Audrey Hepburn. Elegant. Fragile. Elfin. Innocent. Entrancing. Then there's one that completely applies, but we ignore it all the time: Incomparable.

Audrey Hepburn is the female movie star we simply can't get over, even though she's been gone for years. The actress, who seemed aristocratic for a reason- her mother was a Dutch baroness- essentially retired in the late 1960s after making a slew of perennial favorites, including "Sabrina," "Roman Holiday" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's." She appeared in only a few movies after that. Later in life, she stayed busy with charity work, most notably as a special ambassador to the United Nations UNICEF fund, until her death in 1993 at the age of 63.

But she's far from forgotten. Even though we know she's incomparable, we're always on the lookout for someone who might, just possibly, replace her. Every doe-eyed ingenue that comes along gets the Audrey Hepburn once-over. Is she waifish enough, entrancing enough? Just in the last decade, actresses as diverse as Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Bai Ling, Penelope Cruz, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Thandie Newton have all been described as being Hepburn-like in some way.

The newest ingenue with Audrey appeal is a 23-year-old Frenchwoman named Audrey Tautou (pronounced toe-too), star of France's biggest import of the year, the wildly popular "Amelie" (also known as "Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain"), which opens in the Bay Area next Friday. Not only does Tautou share Hepburn's first name, but she also seems to share Hepburn's ability to bewitch. Entertainment writers everywhere have been going nuts for her, and there's hardly a story about the movie that doesn't mention her similarity to Hepburn.

The fact that the elfin Tautou has cropped dark hair, enormous brown eyes, big ears and a mouth that goes from mischievous to forlorn in a heartbeat certainly contributes to the resemblance. But there's also a special alchemy about director Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Amelie" that enhances Tautou's Hepburn-like qualities. Amelie is just the kind of character Hepburn herself would have been ideally suited to.

Amelie is an innocent, a girl with a pure heart, who tries to satisfy her need for love by doing goofy good deeds for her neighbors. But she's capable of mischief, playing gentle tricks on the man she has a crush on, dodging his requests to know her name in much the same way Sabrina flirtatiously refused to reveal her identity to David (William Holden) on the way home from the train station in "Sabrina." Like any number of Hepburn characters- Ariane in "Love in the Afternoon," Nicole in "How to Steal a Million," Sabrina and Holly Golightly- Amelie is motherless. And like Holly, Amelie is deeply fearful of intimacy, but she's also drawn to it, skirting it, like a cat contemplating a lap.

The fact that "Amelie" is shot entirely in Paris also sparks memories of Hepburn, who ran around those Parisian streets in many of her movies ("Charade," "How to Steal a Million" and "Love in the Afternoon," not to mention "Funny Face").

But even with all these similarities of character and place, the strongest resemblance to Hepburn lies in Tautou's way of being quiet on-screen, communicating almost like a mime. Hepburn often used her eyes and smile to talk to us. Remember those last minutes of William Wyler's "Roman Holiday," when she expressed everything- the bittersweet mixture of saying goodbye forever to Gregory Peck, knowing that he loved her, but knowing that her duty came first- with her face?

A silent Hepburn could bring tears to your eyes, and she excelled at being alone on screen. Looking back now, from our wildly fast-paced culture, the scene in "Sabrina" where Billy Wilder turns the camera on Hepburn as she writes an entire suicide note, seems almost unfathomable. Most directors today would opt for the quick voice-over, the fade-out, anything to dodge that scary thought of leaving a lone actress up on the screen to hold our attention. Hepburn could do it. So can Tautou, or at least she can when she's directed by Jeunet.

Tautou has made other movies, but the only one that has made it to the United States is "Venus Beauty Institute," a Nathalie Baye film that came and went quickly last fall. Jeunet had planned to cast English actress Emily Watson in "Amelie," but when difficulties arose about scheduling, he sought out Tautou, whom he'd seen on a poster for "Venus Beauty Institute."

"I saw the big eyes and the big ear like a gnome or elf, and I thought hmmm, she could be interesting for me," Jeunet said.

Tautou was the first actress he saw after Watson, and he knew immediately he had found his Amelie. "She's very clever," he said during a telephone interview from France. "She was exactly what I was looking for. In fact, I don't need to direct her at all. I told her, if I don't speak with you on the set it's not because I don't care. It is because you are perfect."

He said he thinks she does have a bit of that Hepburn magic, but as a Frenchman, he's not all that familiar with Hepburn. With her dark hair and pale skin, he said Tautou reminds him more of Snow White (fitting, given that his movie is a fairy tale). Either way, he said he expects her to be a huge star.

"I told her, Audrey, you have to learn English as soon as possible, because France is too small for you," he said.

In yet another similarity to Hepburn, Tautou is deceptively fragile, with a strong inner core, he said. "She looks shy but she is no child, believe me," he said. "When she met the French president, Jacques Chirac, he said to her, 'I thought you were in Portugal,' and she looked at him from the feet to the head and said, 'You have to check your sources.'"

Tautou has humbly declined to compare herself to Hepburn. That ladylike response is really the only way to deal with the compliment, and it's the route most other actresses similarly flattered have taken, knowing intuitively that it's a trap to even hope to imitate a screen legend. Because even while we long to see Hepburn's magic anew, we also refuse to accept any substitutes. When TV actress Jennifer Love Hewitt, a girl known for her curves, dared to portray Hepburn in ABC's "The Audrey Hepburn Story," she was practically run out of town by appalled critics. Not only was she wrong physically, but emotionally she came from the wrong side of the entertainment tracks- television and bad teen movies. She was simply not classy enough.

Then think of poor Julia Ormond, a pretty English actress who was enjoying a blossoming career, having just won Brad Pitt's heart in "Legends of the Fall," when she was cast in Sydney Pollack's remake of "Sabrina." It wasn't entirely Ormond's fault (why even think of touching a classic like Billy Wilder's "Sabrina"?), but the movie stunk and she'll forever be known as that girl who tried to be Hepburn and failed miserably.

Movie writer David Thomson, author of "A Biographical Dictionary of Film," said that even if a new Audrey Hepburn turned up, we probably wouldn't appreciate her taken out of the context of the 1950s, when Hepburn first won our hearts.

"She was a person of extraordinary integrity and purity, in an age when those things were not automatically mocked," Thomson said. "The problem is today, I think that if within, say, a high school community, if somebody came along who looked like Audrey, who was clearly very pretty, but someone who had that sort of absolutely unflawed, totally irony-free goodness, her real virtuousness, that kid would be mocked. She'd be called a freak and a nerd and too good to be true. It's as if we've given up on that kind of personality and yet I think we miss it too."

Maybe the best favor we can do Tautou is to stop talking about the other Audrey- who after all, will always be available to us on video. Billy Wilder, incomparable in his own way, may have said it best. In Cameron Crowe's book "Conversations with Wilder," Crowe mentions to Wilder that it seems as if every year a new actress is heralded as the next Audrey Hepburn.

Wilder made it instantly clear how pointless that is. Today's audiences have Julia Roberts, he said, a latter-day version of Hepburn, but distinctly her own being, not an imitation. As for Hepburn, he said: "There will not be another. She exists forever, in her time. You cannot duplicate her, or take her out of her era … If the element X could be distilled, you could make all the Monroes you wanted, and all the Hepburns … like that sheep they cloned. But you can't … No actress should be expected to be Audrey Hepburn. That dress by Mr. Givenchy has already been filled."