Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn: From Tulip Bulbs to Tiffany's

During the Dutch famine of the winter of 1944, her family ground tulip bulbs into flour to make bread. She developed jaundice, anaemia, oedema and a respiratory infection, and was saved by penicillin bought with cigarettes sold on the black market. Nine years later she won an Academy Award. Forty-four years later, explaining to UNICEF why she had taken the job, she put it plainly: "I can testify to what UNICEF means to children, because I was among those who received food and medical relief after World War II."

A Baroness's Daughter, a Fascist's Daughter

She was born Audrey Kathleen Ruston on 4 May 1929 in Ixelles, Brussels. Her mother was Baroness Ella van Heemstra, daughter of a baron who had been mayor of Arnhem and governor of Dutch Guiana. Her father, Joseph Ruston, was a British subject who abandoned the family in 1935 — "the most traumatic event of my life," she said later.

The part usually left out of the fairy tale is what he abandoned them for. In the mid-1930s both her parents collected donations for the British Union of Fascists; her mother met Hitler and wrote favourably about him; her father went deep into fascist politics in London and never once visited his daughter abroad. The most beloved humanitarian in twentieth-century cinema was raised, briefly, in a household that had flirted with the enemy she would then spend a war hiding from.

Arnhem

After the German invasion in 1940 the family moved to Arnhem, and she took the alias Edda van Heemstra, since an English-sounding name was dangerous. What she saw she described without decoration: "We saw young men put against the wall and shot, and they'd close the street and then open it, and you could pass by again." Her uncle Otto van Limburg Stirum was executed in 1942 in reprisal for resistance sabotage. One half-brother was deported to a German labour camp; the other went into hiding.

The Ballerina Who Was Told No

She trained in ballet at the Arnhem Conservatory during the war, then under Sonia Gaskell in Amsterdam and Marie Rambert in London from 1948, winning a scholarship with Ballet Rambert. Then she was told the truth: her height and the weakened constitution left by wartime malnutrition meant she would never be a prima ballerina. Acting was the fallback. It is worth registering the size of that disappointment — the career the world knows was plan B, forced on her by starvation.

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Colette

In 1951 the novelist Colette, staying at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo, saw her in a bit part and cast her in the Broadway production of *Gigi*.

William Wyler then cast her in *Roman Holiday* (1953) over Elizabeth Taylor on the strength of a screen test. "She had everything I was looking for: charm, innocence, and talent," he said. She won the Academy Award, the BAFTA and the Golden Globe for Best Actress — the first actress to take all three for a single performance — and won a Tony the same year for *Ondine*.

Then *Sabrina* (1954) with Bogart and Holden, a nomination and a BAFTA; *Funny Face* (1957) with Astaire, singing her own vocals; *The Nun's Story* (1959), of which Variety judged that "Hepburn has her most demanding film role, and she gives her finest performance"; and *Breakfast at Tiffany's* (1961), the defining role, which she found agonising — "I'm an introvert. Playing the extroverted girl was the hardest thing I ever did." *My Fair Lady* (1964) arrived with the dubbing controversy attached, Marni Nixon singing for her, and Bosley Crowther nonetheless writing that "Audrey Hepburn superbly justifies the decision of Jack Warner to get her to play the title role." *Wait Until Dark* (1967), as a terrorised blind woman, brought her fifth and final Oscar nomination.

Givenchy

Hubert de Givenchy first dressed her for *Sabrina* in 1954, having been initially disappointed that the Hepburn coming to see him was not Katharine. He went on to design for seven of her films, including *Breakfast at Tiffany's*, whose little black dress is arguably the most famous garment in cinema; one of her black dresses sold at Christie's for £467,200 in 2006. She was the face of his first perfume, L'Interdit, in 1957. Cecil Beaton, writing in Vogue in 1954, called her "the public embodiment of our new feminine ideal" — slim, gamine, approachable, an alternative to the hourglass then dominant.

The Last Four Years

She married Mel Ferrer in 1954; they had a son, Sean, after two miscarriages, and divorced after fourteen years. She married the Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti in 1969, had a second son, Luca, and divorced after twelve. Her last nine years, with the Dutch actor Robert Wolders, she called the happiest of her life.

In 1988 she became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and the work was not ceremonial. Ethiopia, Turkey, Venezuela, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Bangladesh, Thailand, Vietnam, Sudan. She testified before the US Congress, took part in the World Summit for Children, launched the *State of the World's Children* reports and gave endless speeches. In Ethiopia in 1988, having visited an orphanage of five hundred starving children: "I have a broken heart. I feel desperate. I can't stand the idea that two million people are in imminent danger of starving." In Sudan in 1989: "These are not natural disasters but man-made tragedies for which there is only one man-made solution — peace." Of Somalia in 1992, which she called apocalyptic: "I have seen nothing like this — so much worse than I could possibly have imagined." That year, already ill with cancer, she travelled to France, Kenya, Somalia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Why Audrey Is Called a Genius

The claim, where it is made at all, is not a claim about intellect, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Nothing in the record — not UNICEF's account, not the contemporary reviews — describes her as a genius, and her own assessment of her acting was modest to the point of self-deprecation. She was never regarded as a technician of the first rank. *My Fair Lady* required someone else to sing for her. She won one Oscar, for her first leading role, and never won another across four further nominations.

What she had was rarer than it looks and harder to counterfeit: a screen presence that read as entirely unguarded. Wyler named the components — "charm, innocence, and talent" — and the order is telling, with talent third. The craft consists of doing very little and remaining completely legible, and it worked at both ends of the register: comedy in *Roman Holiday*, austerity in *The Nun's Story*, terror in *Wait Until Dark*. Her difficulty with Holly Golightly is the giveaway. She was not playing herself; she was constructing an opposite, and the effortlessness was manufactured.

The stronger case is that her genius, if the word applies, was for using fame rather than possessing it. Most stars lend a name to a cause. Hepburn spent the last five years of her life in famine camps and kept travelling after a cancer diagnosis, converting celebrity into logistics — vaccination campaigns, water systems, congressional testimony — with a precision most professional advocates never reach. That is a talent, and it is not an acting talent.

Legacy

She returned from Somalia in September 1992 with abdominal pain that proved to be pseudomyxoma peritonei, a rare cancer already spread across her small intestine. She died in her sleep on 20 January 1993 at her home in Tolochenaz, Switzerland, aged sixty-three. She had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George H. W. Bush weeks earlier, and was awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award posthumously. Posthumous Grammy and Emmy awards completed an EGOT. The American Film Institute ranks her the third-greatest female screen legend of American cinema. Her son Sean founded the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund; her son Luca became patron of a charity for the rare cancer that killed her.