Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Kathleen Ruston was born on May 4, 1929, on the Rue Keyenveld in the Ixelles district of Brussels. Her father, Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston, was a British subject who worked in finance and trade, and her mother, Ella van Heemstra, was a Dutch baroness from an aristocratic family in Arnhem ^[1]. The family name later incorporated Hepburn, drawn from an ancestor on her father's side, and the future actress grew up moving between Belgium, England, and the Netherlands.

Her childhood fractured early. Joseph Ruston abandoned the family in 1935, a loss Hepburn later described as the most traumatic event of her young life, and her parents divorced in 1938 ^[2]. She attended boarding school in Kent for several years, but when war broke out in 1939 her mother brought her to Arnhem, believing the neutral Netherlands would be safer than Britain. The German invasion of May 1940 proved that judgment wrong.

The occupation years shaped her permanently. She studied ballet at the Arnhem Conservatory under increasingly desperate conditions, and during the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944 to 1945 she suffered malnutrition severe enough to cause anemia and lasting health effects ^[1]. Members of her extended family were punished by the occupiers: an uncle was executed in reprisal for resistance activity. Hepburn later said her wartime experience of hunger made her work for starving children a personal debt rather than a celebrity gesture ^[3].

After liberation, Hepburn and her mother moved to Amsterdam and then, in 1948, to London, where she trained with the ballet teacher Marie Rambert. Told that her height and the physical toll of the war years would keep her from becoming a prima ballerina, she turned to musical theatre and modeling to earn a living ^[2]. She appeared in West End chorus lines and took small parts in British films, including a brief role in The Lavender Hill Mob in 1951.

Her break arrived through an unlikely channel. While filming on the French Riviera, she was spotted by the elderly French novelist Colette, who insisted that the unknown dancer play the title role in the Broadway adaptation of her novel Gigi. Hepburn opened in the play in New York in November 1951 and won a Theatre World Award for the performance ^[1].

Hollywood moved quickly. Paramount cast her opposite Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (1953), William Wyler's story of a runaway princess loose in Rome. The film made her an international star overnight, and she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for the role in March 1954, the same month she won a Tony Award for the Broadway play Ondine ^[4]. Few performers have collected an Oscar and a Tony within days of each other, and it remains a striking Audrey Hepburn fact that she did so at age 24 in only her first American starring role.

Any account of Audrey Hepburn achievements begins with a run of films through the 1950s and 1960s that few careers have matched. She starred in Sabrina (1954), Funny Face (1957), and Love in the Afternoon (1957), then earned further Best Actress nominations for The Nun's Story (1959), a demanding dramatic role she considered among her finest work, and for Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) ^[4]. Her portrayal of Holly Golightly in the latter, in a black Givenchy dress with pearls and a cigarette holder, produced one of the most reproduced images in cinema history.

She followed with Charade (1963) opposite Cary Grant, the blockbuster musical My Fair Lady (1964), in which she played Eliza Doolittle, and the thriller Wait Until Dark (1967), which brought her a fifth Academy Award nomination ^[1]. Her long collaboration with the French designer Hubert de Givenchy, who dressed her on screen and off from Sabrina onward, made her as influential in fashion as in film; her gamine haircut, flat shoes, and slim silhouette offered a widely imitated alternative to the era's dominant screen glamour ^[5].

Her honors extended well beyond the 1954 Oscar. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992, and after her death the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave her the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award; her 1994 Grammy for a children's spoken word album made her one of the few people to win Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards ^[4]. In 1999 the American Film Institute ranked her third among the greatest female screen legends of classic Hollywood cinema ^[6].

Hepburn married the American actor and director Mel Ferrer in Switzerland in September 1954, shortly after they appeared together in Ondine. Their son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, was born in 1960 after several miscarriages that caused her deep grief. The marriage ended in divorce in 1968 ^[2].

In 1969 she married the Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, with whom she had a second son, Luca Dotti, in 1970. She sharply reduced her film work during these years, choosing to raise her children at La Paisible, her farmhouse in the village of Tolochenaz above Lake Geneva in Switzerland ^[1]. That marriage also ended in divorce, in 1982. From 1980 until her death her companion was the Dutch actor Robert Wolders, whom she described as the happiest relationship of her life ^[3].

Friends and colleagues consistently described a woman unlike her glamorous public image: private, self-deprecating about her looks, devoted to her garden and her dogs, and happiest away from Hollywood. She spoke five languages, a legacy of her itinerant European upbringing, and kept Switzerland as her permanent home for the last three decades of her life ^[2].

Hepburn stepped back from full-time acting after 1967, returning only occasionally, most notably in Robin and Marian (1976) opposite Sean Connery and a final cameo as an angel in Steven Spielberg's Always (1989) ^[1]. The second act of her life belonged to humanitarian work.

Appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1988, she treated the role as a working job rather than an honorary title. Over five years she made more than fifty field missions, beginning with famine-stricken Ethiopia in March 1988 and continuing to Turkey, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Sudan, Vietnam, and elsewhere ^[3]. She testified before the United States Congress on behalf of child survival programs and gave hundreds of interviews and speeches, repeatedly connecting her advocacy to her own childhood hunger under Nazi occupation.

Her final mission, to Somalia in September 1992 during the famine there, left her visibly shaken; she called it the worst suffering she had ever witnessed. Weeks later, persistent abdominal pain was diagnosed as a rare appendiceal cancer. After surgery in Los Angeles she returned home to Tolochenaz, where she died on January 20, 1993, at age 63. She was buried in the village cemetery, and UNICEF colleagues and film industry figures worldwide mourned her ^[7].

More than three decades after her death, Hepburn remains a shorthand for a particular idea of elegance: restraint, kindness, and style without ostentation. The little black dress from Breakfast at Tiffany's sold at auction at Christie's in 2006 for 467,200 pounds, at the time a record for a film costume, with proceeds directed to charity for children in India ^[8]. Her image continues to appear in advertising, exhibitions, and fashion retrospectives, and any Audrey Hepburn biography written today must reckon with a cultural presence that has outgrown her filmography.

Her humanitarian legacy proved equally durable. Her sons established the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund to continue her work, and UNICEF placed a statue called The Spirit of Audrey at its New York headquarters in 2002 ^[3]. The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp bearing her likeness in 2003.

Within film history her standing has only risen. Critics continue to cite Roman Holiday, The Nun's Story, and Charade as high points of studio-era craftsmanship, and her screen persona, intelligent, vulnerable, and quietly comic, influenced generations of actresses. The essential Audrey Hepburn facts tell two intertwined stories: a wartime child who became the most photographed woman of her age, and a star who spent her fame, in her final years, entirely on children who had none of her luck ^[6].