Audrey Hepburn Biography
Born Edda Van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston to an English-Irish banker father and
a Dutch baroness, she had a near idyllic early childhood in Brussels. But her parents divorced when she was 9. Then came the war, and the Baroness, seeking a safe haven, moved with her daughter to her parents' home in Arnhem.During Holland's Nazi occupation, Edda carried messages for the Resistance in her ballet shoes. In time, as she recalled, "the rationing started, and then, little by little, the reprisals began." An uncle and cousin were shot;her elder half brother, Alexander, was conscripted to work in a Berlin factory. The once chubby girl became gaunt and frail. Certainly the memory of those years never left her: More than a decade later she would turn down director George Steven's offer to make The Diary of Anne Frank because,she explained, "I could not deal with it."
In 1948 the resilient teenager left for England to study ballet and landed a chorus girl's part in a London production of High Button Shoes. Three years later, in Monte Carlo for a movie bit, she was spotted by the novelist Colette, who instantly realized that she had found the girl to play her Gigi on Broadway. The role won Hepburn a Theatre World Award in 1952, and therafter she kept a photo of Colette on her dressing table, inscribed, "To Audrey Hepburn, the treasure I found on the beach."
After seeing her screen test, director William Wyler cast Audrey in his 1953 film, Roman Holiday. "She's not beautiful," said the crusty Wyler after Audrey picked up an Oscar for the part, "but she gets to you."
Humphrey Bograt, may have been the exception. Perhaps he was nettled by her romance with their costar William Holden in 1954's Sabrina. He was quoted to have said she was, "OK if you like doing 36 takes." And a film magazine she long outlasted called her "this weird hybrid with bitched hair."
But the moviegoing public worshiped her, and eventually Bogie recanted. "You take Monroes and the Terry Moores and you know just what you're going to get every time. With Audrey it's kind of unpredictable. She's like a good tennis player--she's varies her shots."
That she did-- through a career that spanned divergent roles in which she somehow always maintained her ineffable aura of class. Though she had doubts about herself ("Oh, I'd like to be not so flat-chested," she once said; "I'd like not to havesuch angular shoulders, such big feet, such a big nose"), few other woman saw these flaws. A rail-thin gamine during the zaftig zeitgeist of the 50's, she created a new ideal of beauty and, with the help of her friend designer Hubert de Givenchy, established an impeccable...look predicated on simplicity.
Audrey was chronically, hopelessly civilized. On locations the world over, she made it a prioprity to establish a sense of home, especially after her 1954 marriage to actor Mell Ferrer. She had met him when they costarred in Broadway's Odine, a play that won her a Tony. Audrey would clear hotel suites of standard-issue items and replace them wit her own items.
The couple's eventual split in 1968 was one of her life's great disappointments, but she found it easier to bear than the miscarriages she suffered. It was while on location in the Congo for The Nun's Storythat her depression over them seemed to lift. "After looking inside an insane asylum, visiting a leper colony, talking to missionary workers and watching operations, I
developed a new kind of inner peacefulness," she said. In January 1960, her first child was born. Ten years later, during a 13-year old marriage to Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, she gave birth, at 40, to another son, Luca.
Always she made it clear that family took precedence over her career. "The fact that I've made movies doesn't mean breakfast gets made or that my child does better in his homework," she said in 1980, explaining an eight-year screen hiatus that ended in 1976 with Robin and Marian. "I still have to function as a woman in a household."
Yet in later years, with her children grown, she found a new purpose. In 1988 she became special ambassador for UNICEF and immediately set off Ethiopia to minister to famine victims. Grueling trips to the Sudan, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bangladesh and Vietnam followed. "I do my best," she said simply, "I wish I could do more."
It was after her return from Somalia last fall that Audrey began suffering stomach pain. Doctors at first suspected she had contracted an amoebic infection, but surgery in November found a graver cause. "Rob Wolders told me she never complained once," says a friend. "It's not that bad," she would say.
But it was. Toward the end, says Gris, "she was in such terrrible pain. She could only speak in a whisper. She could not talk to all of the people who called."
Hepburn seemed to sense that she was destined to play a special role not just in movies but also in people's lives. "People associate me with a time when movies were pleasant," she said, "when women wore pretty dresses in films and you heard beautiful music. I always love it when people write me and say, 'I was having a rotten time, and I walked into a cinema and saw one of your movies, and it made such a difference.'"
Audrey Hepburn did, in the end, make a difference. In a cruel and imperfect world," says critic Rex Reed, "she was living proof that God could still create perfection."
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Article written by Susan Schunderette, Kristina Johnson and Lynn Morgan in Los Angeles and Ann Guerin in NY City.