She may be best remembered for her on-screen talent and iconic fashion style, but many of Audrey Hepburn’s most inspiring accomplishments lay outside the superficial.
Hepburn’s early life was one of privilege. Born Audrey Kathleen Hepburn-Ruston in 1929, her father’s work as a consul saw the family travel around Europe for the first three years of her life, before finally settling down in Belgium. Hepburn learnt Dutch and English from her parents (later, she would also speak French, Spanish, and Italian), before being sent to boarding school in England when she was only five years old.
Both of Hepburn’s parents were fascists, but her father’s increasingly radical support of the Nazis, coupled with his various vices, saw him suddenly abandon Hepburn and her mother in 1935. A divorce followed in 1938, and although her father was allowed visitation rights, he never enacted them. Hepburn would later call this period “the most traumatic event of my life”. Decades later, she reunited with him. Though their relationship never recovered, Hepburn supported him financially until his death.
The following year, Britain declared war on Germany. In response, Hepburn and her mother moved to the Netherlands, a country that had vowed to remain neutral. It was hoped that, as such, the Dutch would be spared from German invasion. It was not to be.
Hepburn adopted the name Edda van Heemstra during this time to avoid attention from the Nazis, but it did not save her from the pain the entire nation felt over the next half decade. “..had we known that we were going to be occupied for five years, we might have all shot ourselves.”
Her uncle was executed for an act he had not committed, and one of her half-brothers from her mother’s previous marriage was sent to Berlin to work in a German labour camp.
As Hepburn grew older, she began to participate in the Dutch resistance, smuggling messages and performing ballet at fundraising events for audiences too scared to applaud in case nearby soldiers overheard.
The Nazis restricted food supplies following the D-Day attacks. Hepburn, like so many others, suffered from malnutrition. The condition resulted in Hepburn developing the slight frame for which she would become famous in later years.
Following the war, the family moved to Amsterdam, where Hepburn recommenced the ballet training she had first started back in England, before trying her hand at film. In 1948 she made her debut in an educational film entitled Dutch in Seven Lessons.
In late 1948, Hepburn returned to England to undertake a ballet scholarship with one of the country’s leading dance companies, Ballet Rambert. She supported herself by working as a model, and dropped ‘Ruston’ from her surname.
Her wartime malnutrition soon came back to plague her. Teachers at Rambert told her that although she had talent, her weak constitution meant she could never become a prima ballerina.
So it was that she turned full-time to acting.
Between 1948 and 1951, Hepburn took small roles in musical theatre and movies. It was 1951’s Monte Carlo Baby that took her career to the next level. While filming in Monaco, French novelist Colette decided to cast Hepburn in the theatrical adaptation of her novella Gigi. She took the stage in late-November never having spoken on the stage. Nevertheless, the play was a huge hit. “(Hepburn’s) quality is so winning and so right that she is the success of the evening,” declared The New York Times.
Hepburn performed Gigi on Broadway 219 times, winning a Theatre World Award in the process, before spending eight months touring the show across the United States.
Not long after, Hepburn took her first leading role as Princess Anne in Roman Holiday. Producers had initially wanted Elizabeth Taylor, but director William Wyler was so impressed by Hepburn that he cast her instead. Co-star Gregory Peck suggested that Hepburn receive equal billing as him in the film’s opening credits, telling Wyler “You’ve got to change that because she’ll be a big star and I’ll look like a big jerk.”
He was right. The film was a success, and Hepburn’s portrayal saw her win the Academy Award for Best Actress, BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, and a Golden Globe for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama. She was the first actress to ever receive all three.
Paramount quickly signed her to a seven-film deal, with 12 month gaps in between to allow Hepburn to continue her stage career. The first of these was Billy Wilder’s Sabrina, for which she was once again nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, and won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress.
Later that year, she appeared in the fantasy play Ondine, in a performance that saw her win the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.
By the time she returned to the screen in 1956 with War and Peace, Hepburn was one of Hollywood’s most bankable actresses. 1957’s Funny Face showed off her dancing skills, while Love in the Afternoon cemented Hepburn as a comedic talent. In 1959 she received her third Academy Award nomination for The Nun’s Story. “Her portrayal of Sister Luke is one of the great performances of the screen,” said Films in Review.
Hepburn was well aware of her position as a sex symbol, and was determined to expand upon it. “For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.”
Hepburn also starred in an adventure film and a western before taking on what is perhaps her most defining role as Holly Golightly in the adaptation of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The ‘little black dress’ which she wears in the film’s opening credits confirmed Hepburn’s position as a fashion figurehead. It has come to be known as an icon of 20th century culture.
Of her remaining films, produced intermittently over the next three decades, undoubtedly the most notable is My Fair Lady, a role she had only taken when the director refused to cast Julie Andrews, who had starred in the stage play the film was based on.
From 1967, Hepburn dedicated more time to her family. Her last role in a film was a cameo appearance as an angel in Steven Spielberg’s 1988 film Always. She completed two more projects afterwards: a documentary series for PBS called Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn, and a spoken word album, Audrey Hepburn’s Enchanted Tales, on which she reads classic children’s stories.
For the former, she received an Emmy for Outstanding Individual Achievement – Informational Programming. The latter saw her win a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album for Children.
As such, Hepburn is only one of 12 individuals who have achieved the ‘grand slam’ of American entertainment, the EGOT: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony.
After completing work on Always, Hepburn turned her attention to humanitarian causes as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. “As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.”
What she saw on her first visit to Ethiopia in 1988 saw her dedicate the last years of her life to helping starving children across the world. “”I have a broken heart... I went into rebel country and saw mothers and their children who had walked for ten days, even three weeks, looking for food, settling onto the desert floor into makeshift camps where they may die. Horrible. That image is too much for me. The ‘Third World’ is a term I don’t like very much, because we’re all one world. I want people to know that the largest part of humanity is suffering.”
She joined UNICEF for an immunisation campaign in Turkey in August 1988, and by October was in South America. She also toured Central America, Vietnam, and visited Somalia.
Little did anyone realise, but only four months after this last trip, Audrey Hepburn would be dead.
Returning to her home in Switzerland, Hepburn found herself suffering from abdominal pain. Travelling to the United States for tests, it was revealed that she was suffering from a rare abdominal cancer that was in its terminal stages.
A private jet was arranged to allow Hepburn to return home for one last Christmas, but not before she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom award in recognition of her work with UNICEF.
On the evening of January 20th, 1993, Hepburn died in her sleep.
“How shall I sum up my life? I think I’ve been particularly lucky.”
In the years following her death, The American Film Institute named Hepburn the third greatest female star of all time, and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded her the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Her son Sean launched the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, while the US Fund for UNICEF founded the Audrey Hepburn Society, a group that recognises the fund’s most generous donators, whose contributions now total almost $100 million.
In 2002, at the United National Special Session on Children, UNICEF unveiled a statue entitled The Spirit of Audrey, located at their New York headquarters.
Her contribution as an actress, a style icon, and a humanitarian remains strong today, 87 years after her birth. Few people honour the planet with such talent and compassion as Audrey Hepburn did; it is only right that we continue to celebrate her legacy.