Audrey Hepburn

Brussels and the war

Audrey Kathleen Ruston was born on 4 May 1929 in Brussels. Her mother, Ella van Heemstra, was a Dutch baroness; her father, Joseph Ruston, was a British subject born in Bohemia who worked in business.

Both parents were involved with British fascism in the 1930s, and her father was interned as a Nazi sympathiser during the war. He left the family in 1935, when Audrey was six, and she barely saw him again, later describing the desertion as the most traumatic event of her life. She traced him in the 1960s and supported him financially until his death.

In 1939 her mother moved the children to Arnhem in the Netherlands, believing it would be safer than Britain. Germany invaded in 1940.

Hepburn spent the occupation in Arnhem, taking ballet lessons and giving secret performances to raise money for the Dutch resistance, playing to audiences who could not applaud in case they were heard. Her uncle was executed in reprisal for a resistance action. In the Dutch famine of the winter of 1944, she was reduced to eating tulip bulbs and grass, and by the liberation she was severely malnourished, with anaemia, jaundice, oedema and respiratory problems.

She was fifteen. The malnutrition left lasting health problems, and Hepburn said it was the reason she stayed so thin.

Ballet and the first parts

After the war Hepburn trained in ballet in Amsterdam, then went to London on a scholarship and studied under Marie Rambert. Rambert told her she was too tall to be a prima ballerina, and that years of wartime malnutrition had left her without the strength for it.

She switched to work that paid: chorus lines in West End musicals, small film parts, modelling. She appeared in half a dozen British films in bit roles between 1948 and 1951.

In 1951, filming in the south of France, she was spotted by the novelist Colette, who declared her the only possible actress to play the lead in the Broadway adaptation of her novel Gigi. Hepburn had almost no acting experience. The production opened at the Fulton Theatre that November and made her a name in America. Cathleen Nesbitt played Aunt Alicia opposite her.

Roman Holiday

Roman Holiday, released in 1953, gave Hepburn her first major film role: a European princess who slips away from her official duties for a day in Rome with an American reporter, played by Gregory Peck.

Peck, already a star, told the producers during filming that her name should go above the title alongside his, which was unheard of for an unknown. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for it at twenty-four.

In 1954 she also won a Tony Award for the play Ondine, and on 25 September married its co-star, the actor Mel Ferrer. Five weeks after the wedding the couple went to Amsterdam for a formal film evening at the Tuschinski theatre.

Givenchy

For Sabrina in 1954, Hepburn went to Paris to find clothes for the part and walked into the atelier of Hubert de Givenchy, then twenty-six and newly established. He had been expecting Katharine Hepburn.

He dressed her for most of the rest of her career, on screen and off, and they remained close friends for forty years. The clothes are inseparable from the image: the black dress and pearls at the start of Breakfast at Tiffany's, the wedding dress in Funny Face, the cocktail dresses in Charade.

Givenchy also created her perfume, L'Interdit, originally made for her alone, and she became the first actress to advertise a fragrance.

The great run

Between 1953 and 1967 Hepburn made the films she is remembered for: Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, Love in the Afternoon, The Nun's Story, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Charade, My Fair Lady, Two for the Road and Wait Until Dark.

Funny Face, in 1957, is the Paris one. Hepburn plays a Greenwich Village bookshop clerk taken to Paris by a fashion photographer, played by Fred Astaire, and the film turns the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Champs-Élysées, Montmartre and the Seine into a moving fashion spread. Richard Avedon was its visual consultant and made the still photographs that appear inside it.

Breakfast at Tiffany's, released in 1961, is the one that fixed her permanently in public memory. She plays Holly Golightly, a young woman living off wealthy men in New York, and she disliked the part, thinking herself wrong for it.

The film contains Mickey Rooney's performance as a Japanese neighbour, in makeup and false teeth, which drew heavy criticism as a racist caricature and which the film's director, Blake Edwards, later said he regretted.

For My Fair Lady in 1964 Hepburn was cast over Julie Andrews, who had played Eliza Doolittle on Broadway, and her singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon. The casting was unpopular and she was not nominated for an Academy Award. Andrews won that year for Mary Poppins.

Stepping back

Hepburn and Mel Ferrer had a son, Sean, in 1960. She also had several miscarriages during the marriage, which ended in 1968.

In 1969 she married the Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, had a second son, Luca, in 1970, and largely stopped working to raise him. She made only a handful of films after 1967.

She and Dotti separated in 1980 and divorced in 1982. From 1980 until her death she lived with the Dutch actor Robert Wolders.

UNICEF

In 1988 Hepburn was appointed a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, and it became her main occupation for the last five years of her life.

She went to Ethiopia during the famine. She went to Turkey, Venezuela, Ecuador, Central America, Sudan, Bangladesh and Vietnam. In September 1992 she went to Somalia, and said afterwards that it was beyond anything she had imagined. She gave press conferences and testified before the United States Congress, using her fame to get cameras into places that were otherwise not being filmed.

She was explicit about why. She had been, she said, among those who received food and medical relief after the Second World War, and she was paying back a debt.

Death

Hepburn returned from Somalia in late 1992 with abdominal pain. Surgery in November found a rare cancer of the appendix that had already spread.

She flew home to Switzerland in a private plane lent by Givenchy, filled with flowers, and died at her house at Tolochenaz on 20 January 1993, aged sixty-three. She is buried in the village cemetery.

She was awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award by the Academy after her death, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1992.

Why Audrey Hepburn matters

Hepburn changed the shape of a female film star. Hollywood in the early 1950s wanted Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell; Hepburn was flat, thin, long-necked and short-haired, and after Roman Holiday that became a look women copied for seventy years. Her build was partly the result of childhood malnutrition during the Dutch famine of 1944.

She also made an unusual choice about what fame is for. She stopped acting almost entirely at forty. At fifty-eight she took a job that required repeated visits to famine and war zones, on the explicit grounds that she had been on the receiving end of relief work as a child and owed it.

Funny Face, 1957, and Richard Avedon

Funny Face is the most Paris-centred film Hepburn made and the one with the strongest claim on the history of photography. Stanley Donen directed it for Paramount; Hepburn plays a Greenwich Village bookshop assistant taken to Paris as a fashion model, opposite Fred Astaire as a fashion photographer. It borrows its title and four songs from the 1927 Gershwin stage musical and almost nothing else.

The photographer Richard Avedon took two credits on it, as special visual consultant and for the main title backgrounds, and his fingerprints are all over the picture. He designed the opening titles. The photographs on the walls of the fictional magazine's offices are his, as are the images in the Think Pink number. The single most reproduced shot in the film is his: the deliberately overexposed close-up that Astaire's character lifts out of the developing bath in the red-lit darkroom, Hepburn reduced to eyes, eyebrows, nose and mouth.

Astaire's character was built on Avedon. The screenwriter Leonard Gershe had served with him in the Merchant Marine and based the plot on Avedon's real courtship of the model Doe Avedon, whom he found in Greenwich Village while shooting for Harper's Bazaar. Kay Thompson's magazine editor is usually taken to be Diana Vreeland. Avedon said afterwards that he had made sure most of what happens in the film could at least really have happened.

The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, including costume design, shared between Edith Head and Hubert de Givenchy.

The other Paris pictures

Hepburn made four more films in and about Paris. Love in the Afternoon (1957) was Billy Wilder's, shot in the city with Gary Cooper and Maurice Chevalier. Charade (1963), with Cary Grant, is a thriller that moves through Paris and is the one people remember. Paris When It Sizzles (1964) is set in an apartment there.

How to Steal a Million (1966) is the one that belongs most squarely to this site's subject. It is a heist film about stealing a sculpture out of a Paris art museum, made because the piece is a forgery and its exposure would ruin the heroine's father. Hepburn plays the daughter, opposite Peter O'Toole, and William Wyler directed.

Colette casts her, 1951

The turn in Hepburn's career came from a novelist rather than a director. In 1951 she was in Monte Carlo making a small film called Monte Carlo Baby. Colette was staying at the Hôtel de Paris during the shoot, saw her, and decided that this was the girl to play the title role in the Broadway adaptation of her novella Gigi.

The story is repeated everywhere in a tidied-up form, usually with an exclamation Colette is supposed to have made on the spot. That wording has no source. What is documented, and documented by Colette's own standard biographer Judith Thurman rather than by anyone selling a Hepburn legend, is that Colette was there, saw her, and chose her.

Anita Loos wrote the adaptation and the play opened on Broadway in November 1951. Hepburn was unknown when it was announced and a star by the time it closed. Three years later she won a Tony for Ondine. The role of Gigi on film went to Leslie Caron, in Vincente Minnelli's 1958 version.