The Full Biography
Audrey Hepburn. Actress. Fashion emblem. UNICEF ambassador.
This is her story.
The image most people still carry is a slight woman in a black dress and pearls, standing before a Tiffany window at dawn, coffee in one hand, a pastry in the other. The year was 1961. The picture was Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The face was already famous. What the still cannot show is the long road behind it: a childhood under occupation, a dancer who was not quite strong enough for the great companies, and a young actress who won Hollywood by refusing to play it the old way.
She was born Audrey Kathleen Ruston on May 4, 1929, in Ixelles, a borough of Brussels. Her mother was the Dutch baroness Ella van Heemstra. Her father, Joseph Ruston, was a British businessman who later styled the family name Hepburn-Ruston. The marriage did not hold. When Audrey was six, her father left. She would say, later and without decoration, that the loss never fully healed.
I was born with an enormous need for affection, and a terrible need to give it.Audrey Hepburn
The family moved between Belgium, England, and the Netherlands. Then the war came. Audrey spent the occupation years in and around Arnhem. Food grew scarce. Ballet class continued when it could, because the work of the body was one of the few things the occupation could not entirely take. She performed in secret recitals to raise money for the Dutch resistance. She later said she carried messages. Those years did not make her a saint. They made her exact.
The Hunger Winter of 1944–45 nearly took her. She developed anemia, respiratory trouble, and edema. The willowy figure the cameras would later worship was, in part, the mark of a girl who had learned what an empty kitchen meant. After the liberation, relief agencies — including what became UNICEF — brought food and medicine. She never forgot who had fed her.
I can testify to what UNICEF means to children, because I was among those who received food and medical relief right after World War II.Hepburn, as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador
After the war she danced in the Netherlands and then in London, first with Sonia Gaskell and later with Marie Rambert. The great ballet companies did not claim her. The war had stolen too many years of training, and her frame, however elegant on a stage, was not built for the heaviest classical repertory. She took the work that was offered: bits in British pictures, a smile in a crowd, a girl crossing a room. The Lavender Hill Mob. A chorus line. A small part in a comedy shot on the Riviera.
The door opened in Monte Carlo, not in a studio office.
In 1951 the French writer Colette, then in her late seventies, saw the young woman in the Hôtel de Paris and decided she had found her Gigi. Colette had adapted her own novel for Broadway. The part was a girl being trained for a life she did not yet understand. Hepburn played the awakening, not the joke. The notices in New York were strong. Hollywood, which had been looking for a new kind of leading woman, took notice.
William Wyler cast her opposite Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday (1953). She was a runaway princess. He was a reporter who knew her secret and, for once in a studio picture, did not spend the last reel cashing it in. Hepburn did not overplay the royal manner. She played the relief of being ordinary for a day. The Academy Award for Best Actress followed. She was twenty-four. The same season she won a Tony Award on Broadway for Ondine, opposite Mel Ferrer, whom she married in 1954.
What came next was not a lucky streak. It was a run.
Sabrina (1954), for Billy Wilder, put her between Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. She arrived at Hubert de Givenchy’s salon in Paris expecting a fitting. Givenchy was expecting Katharine Hepburn. He cut for the woman who had actually walked in — long neck, narrow shoulders, no padding — and American women copied the line for a generation. The collaboration was not a publicity stunt. It lasted the rest of her life. He dressed her on screen and off. She called him her dearest friend in clothes.
Funny Face (1957) with Fred Astaire. Love in the Afternoon (1957) with Gary Cooper. The Nun’s Story (1959) for Fred Zinnemann, the part she often named as the one that asked the most of her. The roles changed. The precision did not. She could be comic without mugging and grave without speechmaking. Between pictures she kept a fawn named Ip at home while shooting Green Mansions — a small domestic fact that tells you more about her than another premiere photograph.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s made her an emblem. Truman Capote had wanted Marilyn Monroe for Holly Golightly. Paramount wanted Hepburn. The film is lighter than the novella, and she knew it. What she brought was not Capote’s hard little hustler. She brought a woman performing lightness so the fear would not show. The black dress, the cigarette holder, the song “Moon River” — Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer — attached themselves to her for the rest of her life. She never pretended the costume was the whole woman.
I never think of myself as an icon. What is in other people’s minds is not in my mind. I just do my thing.Hepburn, late in her public life
While audiences were falling in love with Holly, she was already a mother. Sean Hepburn Ferrer was born in 1960. She had also, by then, found the father who had walked out in 1935. The reunion, arranged in the 1960s, was careful and unfinished. She helped support Joseph until he died in 1980. The little girl in Arnhem had wanted him back. The woman who found him learned that some absences do not close.
She turned down the film of The Diary of Anne Frank. The occupation was still too near. That refusal is easy to miss in a career list. It is one of the keys to her.
Charade (1963) with Cary Grant gave her the best light comedy of the run. My Fair Lady (1964) was the controversy. Julie Andrews had created Eliza Doolittle on the stage. Jack Warner wanted a movie name. Hepburn took the role. Her singing was largely dubbed by Marni Nixon. The picture was a vast success. Andrews won the Oscar that year for Mary Poppins. Hepburn did not campaign against the slight. She had already learned that the industry’s memory is short and its manners are worse.
How to Steal a Million (1966) and Two for the Road (1967) showed a grown marriage on screen before her own first marriage ended. Wait Until Dark (1967), as a blind woman holding a house against burglars, showed the steel under the famous gentleness. It was a hit. It was also, in a sense, a farewell to the old studio run.
Six things most people never knew
- Hepburn was not her name at birth. She was Audrey Kathleen Ruston. The Hepburn was a later family styling her father adopted, and the world kept it.
- The famous silhouette began as hunger. After the Dutch Hunger Winter she was anemic, swollen with edema, and short of breath. The camera later called that body chic.
- Colette cast her in a hotel lobby. Gigi did not come from a Hollywood test. It came from an elderly novelist in Monte Carlo who looked at a dancer and saw her own girl.
- She would not play Anne Frank. The part was offered. She declined. She had lived too close to that attic to act it for a studio.
- Holly Golightly was supposed to be Marilyn Monroe. Capote said so. The Holly a generation memorized — the dress, the pastry, the window — is Hepburn’s invention more than his.
- Givenchy thought Katharine was coming. The most famous partnership in modern film fashion began as a mix-up of Hepburns. He cut for the one who arrived.
She left the grind.
That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because it was quiet. Many stars announce a retirement and then take three more pictures. Hepburn meant it. She had two sons to raise. Sean with Mel Ferrer. Luca Dotti, born in 1970, after she married the Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti in 1969 and made a life in Rome. The Ferrer marriage had ended in 1968. The Dotti marriage ended in 1982. She did not perform those endings for the columns. She went home.
The later years
Home, by then, was also La Paisible — “the peaceful place” — a farmhouse in Tolochenaz, in the Swiss canton of Vaud, looking toward Lake Geneva. She gardened. She cooked. She kept dogs. She was, to the village, a neighbor who happened to have been Holly Golightly, not a monument on a hill.
In 1980 she began a life with Robert Wolders, a Dutch actor and the widower of Merle Oberon. They never married. They did not need the paperwork. For the last twelve years of her life he was the companion who traveled with her, sat through the UNICEF briefings, and brought her back to Tolochenaz when the work was done. Friends said it was the easiest of her loves. She had waited a long time for easy.
She did not vanish from the screen. She chose the pictures the way a careful woman chooses a guest list. Robin and Marian (1976) put her opposite Sean Connery as an older Maid Marian — gray in the story, unvanity in the playing. Bloodline (1979) was a misfire she did not pretend otherwise. They All Laughed (1981), for Peter Bogdanovich, was a New York comedy that found its audience late. In 1989 Steven Spielberg asked her to play an angel in Always. She said yes. It is a brief appearance. It is the last time a movie camera looked at her as if she still belonged to the industry. She looks as if she has already joined another one.
The work she loved in those years was not another star vehicle. It was Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn, a 1991 series for PBS. She walked the gardens she admired — including her own — and spoke about them in that precise, unhurried voice. After her death the series won her an Emmy. A spoken-word album, Audrey Hepburn’s Enchanted Tales, brought a Grammy. Added to the Oscar and the Tony, that completed the rare EGOT. The last two awards arrived after she was gone. She never stood on those stages to collect them.
In 1988 she became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF. This was not a celebrity tour with a logo. She had lived through a war as a child. She treated the job as a job.
- Ethiopia, 1988 — drought and civil war. She walked the feeding centers and then gave as many as fifteen interviews a day so the pictures would not die in a file.
- Turkey, 1988 — immunization and water.
- Venezuela and Ecuador, 1988 — children in the hills and the cities.
- Central America and Sudan, 1989 — camps, clinics, the long inventory of preventable death.
- Bangladesh, 1989 — flood and recovery.
- Vietnam, 1990 — a country American audiences still argued about; she went for the children, not the argument.
- Somalia, September 1992 — her last field mission. She came home exhausted and in pain.
As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.Hepburn, on the work that replaced the studio
People who had known only the Tiffany still discovered that the woman in it had a second career, and that she treated it as work. She did not orate. She reported. She stood in camps and said, in that same exact voice, what she had seen.
The pain after Somalia was not fatigue. Surgeons in Los Angeles found a rare cancer of the appendix. She went home to La Paisible to die in the house she had chosen. Robert Wolders was there. Her sons were there. She died on January 20, 1993. She was sixty-three. The funeral in Tolochenaz was small. A UNICEF flag was on the coffin. The village came. Hollywood, for once, was not the point.
After she was gone
The obituaries led with the dress and the smile. The better ones remembered Arnhem and the last flights. Sean Ferrer and Luca Dotti have spent the decades since guarding the name — the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, the careful licensing, the refusal to let the face become a costume-shop joke. Givenchy kept her standard in the atelier. UNICEF kept her file in the field. Gardens of the World still plays on public television. Roman Holiday still teaches film students how little a star can do, and how much it counts.
She did not have the longest career in pictures. She had one of the cleanest.
She came out of a war, found the one kind of dancing the camera would take, and then, when the camera had had enough of her, she put the famous face in the service of children who would never see Breakfast at Tiffany’s. That is the arc. That is the story.
The most important thing is to enjoy your life — to be happy — it’s all that matters.Hepburn
The still at the window will last. It should. But the life behind it was harder, shorter, and more useful than the still can say. She was a girl who went hungry, a dancer the companies would not take, a princess on a stolen holiday, a woman in a little black dress, a mother in Rome and Switzerland, a neighbor in Tolochenaz, and, at the end, a witness in a UNICEF tent. If you only remember the dress, you have the photograph. If you remember the tent, you have her.
Portrait: Bud Fraker (Paramount Pictures) · Public Domain · via Wikimedia Commons