Audrey Hepburn

• 1. Introduction

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  Audrey Hepburn stood on a train platform in occupied Arnhem as a young girl, watching a boy in an oversized coat board a train bound for a concentration camp. "I was a child observing a child," she said later. That image never left her. It shaped everything that followed: the discipline she poured into her craft, the restraint that made critics reach for words like "enchanting" and "pulsing", and the decades she spent on behalf of the world's most vulnerable children. How did a girl raised on tulip-bulb flour in wartime Netherlands become one of the most awarded performers in the history of Hollywood? And what drove a screen legend, at the height of her fame, to walk away from films and into the famine zones of Ethiopia and Somalia? Those are the questions this story will answer.

• 2. An Aristocratic Upbringing, Fractured

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  Audrey Kathleen Ruston was born on the 4th of May 1929 at number 48 Rue Keyenveld in Ixelles, a municipality of Brussels. Her family called her Adriaantje. Her mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, was the daughter of a man who had governed Dutch Guiana and served as mayor of Arnhem. Her father, Joseph Ruston, was a British subject born in the Kingdom of Bohemia who would later change his surname to the more impressive-sounding Hepburn-Ruston, believing himself descended from a Scottish nobleman. The family's early years were peripatetic, moving between Brussels, Arnhem, The Hague, and London, before settling in suburban Brussels in 1932.

  The stability did not last. In the mid-1930s, Ella and Joseph recruited for the British Union of Fascists; Ella met Adolf Hitler and wrote favourable articles about him. Then, in 1935, Joseph left the family abruptly after a scene in Brussels, moved to London, and never visited his daughter abroad again. Hepburn later described his departure as "the most traumatic event of my life", saying that "children need two parents" and that she had been "dumped". She was packed off to a private school in the Kent village of Elham, registered there as "Audrey Ruston" or "Little Audrey", while her parents finalised their divorce. Decades later, in the 1960s, she tracked Joseph down in Dublin through the Red Cross. He remained emotionally detached; she supported him financially until his death.

• 3. Five Years in Occupied Netherlands

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  When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Ella moved her daughter to Arnhem, reasoning the Netherlands might remain neutral as it had in the First World War. That gamble failed. After the German invasion in 1940, Hepburn adopted the alias Edda van Heemstra, because an English-sounding name had become dangerous. She trained at the Arnhem Conservatory from 1939 to 1945, becoming the star pupil of her teacher Winja Marova.

  The occupation tightened its grip year by year. In 1942, Hepburn's uncle Otto van Limburg Stirum was executed in retaliation for a resistance act he had not committed; the Germans targeted him because of his family's prominence in Dutch society. Her half-brother Ian was deported to a German labour camp. Her half-brother Alex went into hiding. Ella's sympathy for Nazism evaporated after her brother-in-law's death. Hepburn, her mother, and her aunt Miesje relocated to nearby Velp to live with her grandfather, Baron Aarnoud van Heemstra.

  A 2019 book by Robert Matzen, drawing on Hepburn's own statements, documented that she gave underground concerts to raise money for the resistance, delivered the underground newspaper, carried messages to downed Allied flyers hiding in woodland north of Velp, and volunteered at a hospital that was a centre of resistance activities. The family also temporarily sheltered a British paratrooper during the Battle of Arnhem. During the 1944-1945 Dutch famine, with food and fuel cut off by German reprisals for railway strikes, families made flour from tulip bulbs to bake with. Hepburn emerged from the war suffering from jaundice, anaemia, oedema, and a respiratory infection. A letter from her mother reached Micky Burn, a former lover and British Army officer who had been held at Colditz Castle. He sent thousands of cigarettes; Ella sold them on the black market and bought the penicillin that saved her daughter's life.

• 4. Ballet, Broadway, and a Screen Test

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  After the war, Hepburn trained in Amsterdam under Sonia Gaskell and Russian teacher Olga Tarasova. The family's wartime losses meant Ella now worked as a cook and housekeeper to support them. In 1948, Hepburn made a brief film debut as a stewardess in the Dutch educational travel film Dutch in Seven Lessons, then accepted a ballet scholarship with Ballet Rambert in London's Notting Hill. Marie Rambert told her plainly that her height and the physical damage from malnutrition would prevent her from ever becoming a prima ballerina.

  She pivoted to acting. Working as a chorus girl in West End revues, she appeared in Cecil Landeau's Sauce Tartare at the Cambridge Theatre in 1949 and Sauce Piquante in 1950. The Ealing Studios casting director Margaret Harper-Nelson spotted her during Sauce Piquante and registered her with the Associated British Picture Corporation. Minor film roles followed in 1951, including The Lavender Hill Mob. Her first significant part came in Thorold Dickinson's Secret People (1952), playing a prodigious ballerina and performing all her own dance sequences.

  A small role in the bilingual film Monte Carlo Baby (1952), shot in Monte Carlo, changed everything. French novelist Colette happened to be staying at the Hotel de Paris during filming and decided on the spot to cast Hepburn as the lead in the Broadway play Gigi. Having never spoken on stage, Hepburn required private coaching to prepare. When Gigi opened at the Fulton Theatre on the 24th of November 1951, Life magazine called her a "hit", and The New York Times wrote that "her quality is so winning and so right that she is the success of the evening." The play ran for 219 performances. Meanwhile, director Thorold Dickinson filmed a screen test with the young actress and sent it to William Wyler in Rome, who was preparing a film for Paramount about a runaway princess.

• 5. A Career Built on Firsts

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  William Wyler had initially wanted Elizabeth Taylor for Roman Holiday. After watching the screen test Dickinson sent him, he wrote back with a glowing note of thanks, saying that several Paramount producers had expressed interest in casting Hepburn. He cast her as Princess Ann opposite Gregory Peck, who suggested Hepburn receive equal billing above the title: "You've got to change that because she'll be a big star, and I'll look like a big jerk." The film was released in 1953 and became a box-office success. At the 1953 Academy Awards, Hepburn won Best Actress, becoming the first actress to win an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, and a Golden Globe for the same performance. Reviewer A. H. Weiler in The New York Times described her as "a slender, elfin, and wistful beauty, alternately regal and childlike."

  Three days after the Oscar, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress for playing a water nymph in Jean Giraudoux's Ondine at the 46th Street Theatre on Broadway. That double made her one of only three actresses at that time to receive both awards for Best Actress in the same year. Paramount signed her to a seven-picture contract. Sabrina followed in 1954, with Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. French fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy was hired to design her wardrobe for that film; he had expected Katharine Hepburn. Despite his initial disappointment, the two formed a friendship that lasted the rest of her life. Givenchy went on to design her costumes for films including Breakfast at Tiffany's, Charade, and How to Steal a Million, as well as her off-screen wardrobe.

  For The Nun's Story (1959), Hepburn spent a year researching and working on the role of Sister Luke, saying she had given "more time, energy, and thought to this role than to any of my previous screen performances." Variety wrote that "Hepburn has her most demanding film role, and she gives her finest performance." Films in Review stated that her portrayal of Sister Luke was "one of the great performances of the screen." She received her third Academy Award nomination for that performance. When Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) arrived, Truman Capote, who wrote the source novella, would have preferred Marilyn Monroe in the lead, but acknowledged that Hepburn "did a terrific job." Hepburn herself admitted the role of the extroverted Holly Golightly was "the hardest thing I ever did" for a self-described introvert. One of the Givenchy dresses she wore in the opening credits sold at Christie's in 2006 for £467,200.

• 6. Style, Image, and the Givenchy Bond

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  In 1954, fashion photographer Cecil Beaton declared Hepburn the "public embodiment of our new feminine ideal" in Vogue, writing that "nobody ever looked like her before World War II." When she rose to prominence in Roman Holiday, critics noted that her short hairstyle, thick eyebrows, slim figure, and what journalists called her "gamine" looks offered young women an alternative to the more overtly sexual images associated with Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Journalist Mark Tungate has described Hepburn as a recognisable brand.

  In 1957, Hepburn became the face of Givenchy's first perfume, L'Interdit. Her appearance wearing a Burberry trench coat in Breakfast at Tiffany's was credited with lifting sales of that garment. She was added to the International Best Dressed List in 1961 and inducted into the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame. In the late 1950s, she had popularised plain black leggings. Polls conducted by Evian and QVC named her the most beautiful woman of all time and the most beautiful woman of the 20th century respectively; a Samsung poll in 2015 voted her the most stylish Brit of all time.

  Yet Hepburn was privately ambivalent about her appearance. In a 1959 interview she said, "you can even say that I hated myself at certain periods. I was too fat, or maybe too tall, or maybe just plain too ugly." Off screen she preferred casual, comfortable clothes over haute couture. In 1989 she offered a more measured self-assessment: "my look is attainable. Women can look like Audrey Hepburn by flipping out their hair, buying the large glasses and the little sleeveless dresses." Her son Sean later said, "my mother would be the first person to say that she wasn't the best actress in the world. But she was a movie star."

• 7. Goodwill in Famine Zones

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  In 1989, Hepburn was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador of UNICEF. She had narrated radio programmes for the organisation as far back as the 1950s and had been contributing to it since 1954. At her appointment she said she was grateful for receiving international aid after enduring the German occupation as a child. Between 1988 and 1992, she made field visits to some of the poorest communities in Africa, South America, and Asia.

  Her first field mission took her to Ethiopia in 1988, where she visited an orphanage in Mek'ele housing 500 starving children. She described leaving with a broken heart: "I can't stand the idea that two million people are in imminent danger of starving to death." Later that year she travelled to Turkey for an immunisation campaign, saying the army lent its trucks and fishmongers offered their wagons for the vaccines, and that in ten days the entire country was vaccinated. In October 1988, she reported to the United States Congress on what she had witnessed in Venezuela and Ecuador, describing mountain communities receiving running water for the first time through UNICEF programmes. In April 1989, she joined a mission called Operation Lifeline to ferry food into southern Sudan, where civil war had cut off aid. She met with leaders in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala in February of that year. In October 1989, in Bangladesh, UN photographer John Isaac described how children would run to hold her hand: "she was like the Pied Piper."

  In September 1992, four months before she died, Hepburn went to Somalia. She called it "apocalyptic" and said, "I have seen famine in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, but I have seen nothing like this." On her return to Switzerland she developed abdominal pain. A laparoscopy at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in November revealed pseudomyxoma peritonei, a rare form of abdominal cancer that had grown slowly over several years, coating her small intestine. Surgery was followed by chemotherapy. Her friend Hubert de Givenchy arranged for socialite Rachel Lambert Mellon to send her private Gulfstream jet, filled with flowers, to carry Hepburn from Los Angeles to Geneva. She spent her final weeks in hospice care at her home in Tolochenaz, occasionally well enough to walk in her vegetable garden. On the evening of the 20th of January 1993, Hepburn died in her sleep at the age of 63. In December 1992, she had received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom for her UNICEF work; the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award followed posthumously. In 2002, UNICEF unveiled a statue at its New York headquarters titled "The Spirit of Audrey."