Audrey Hepburn

A wartime childhood

Audrey Hepburn was born Audrey Kathleen Ruston on 4 May 1929 in Ixelles, Brussels, the daughter of the British-born Joseph Ruston and the Dutch baroness Ella van Heemstra. Her childhood moved between Belgium, England, and the Netherlands, and her parents separated when her father left the family in 1935.

She spent the German occupation in the Netherlands, largely around Arnhem, where the family endured the famine of the war's final winter. Hepburn suffered malnutrition, jaundice, and anemia — conditions she carried into adulthood, and which shaped both her slight frame and, later, her sense of what wartime hunger did to children.

From ballet to the stage

After the war Hepburn trained seriously as a ballet dancer, studying in Amsterdam and then in London under Marie Rambert. Told that her height and her weakened wartime constitution would keep her from becoming a prima ballerina, she turned to acting, taking chorus parts in West End revues and small film roles at the start of the 1950s.

Colette chose her for Gigi

In 1951, while Hepburn was filming on the Riviera, the French writer Colette saw her and decided on the spot that she had found the lead for the Broadway adaptation of her novella Gigi. Hepburn had never carried a play. The gamble held: the production opened at the Fulton Theatre that November, and her performance made her a name in New York.

Roman Holiday and stardom

Gigi led straight to Roman Holiday (1953), her first major film, opposite Gregory Peck. It won her the Academy Award for Best Actress and made her an international star. A run of defining films followed: Sabrina (1954), Funny Face (1957), The Nun's Story (1959), and, most enduringly, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961).

She played Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (1964) and earned a fifth Oscar nomination for Wait Until Dark (1967), then stepped back from film to concentrate on her family.

Givenchy and the image

Hepburn's long collaboration with the couturier Hubert de Givenchy, begun with Sabrina, produced one of the most recognizable looks of the twentieth century. The black dress she wears in the opening of Breakfast at Tiffany's became shorthand for a certain kind of elegance, and her name is still attached to it.

UNICEF and last years

From 1988 Hepburn worked as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, making field missions to Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Central and South America. She drew directly on her own wartime hunger, and the work occupied the last years of her life more than film did.

She died of appendiceal cancer on 20 January 1993 at her home in Tolochenaz, Switzerland, at the age of sixty-three. She was survived by two sons, Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Luca Dotti, from her marriages to Mel Ferrer and Andrea Dotti.