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Audrey Hepburn passed away some three decades ago, but she’s still remembered as the epitome of grace and beauty. But despite all we know about her illustrious acting career and philanthropy, there’s so much we don’t know about Hollywood’s greatest fashion icon. One of her grandchildren was quoted as saying, “The best-kept secret about Audrey was that she was sad.”
Behind the charm and impeccable style was a woman who had suffered many traumas early in life. Her broken family barely survived World War II, and Hepburn never fully recovered, either emotionally or physically.
Intrigued? Click through the following gallery to learn all about the pain behind her perfect image, and find out just how resilient she really was.
Audrey Hepburn was born Audrey Kathleen Hepburn-Ruston on May 4, 1929, in Ixelles, Belgium. She was born into an influential but unhappy family.
Her mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, was a Dutch aristocrat related to European royalty. Her father, Joseph Victor Anthony Hepburn-Ruston, was a wealthy British-Austrian oil executive who worked in the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). Audrey had two older half brothers from her mother’s first marriage.
Audrey spent the early years of her life living in a privileged bubble as she traveled between Belgium, Indonesia, and the UK for her father’s job. She grew up bilingual, speaking English and Dutch, and went on to learn French, Spanish, German, and Italian.
The family had strong ties to the UK due to her father, and both of her parents supported the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. Fascism was on the rise in Europe and they were active members of the movement, recruiting and collecting donations.
Joseph left the family rather abruptly one day in 1935 when Audrey was just six years old. He moved to the UK and made no effort to keep in contact with his child, never visiting her again.
“He disappeared one day, mother explained he had gone away on a trip and was not coming back. Mother wouldn’t stop crying, I would just try and be with her but as a child you can’t quite understand,” Hepburn recalled in a 1992 interview.
Hepburn describes this as the first and greatest trauma of her life. It left her with deep insecurities and abandonment issues that plagued her into adulthood.
Decades later, Hepburn tried to reconnect with her father and managed to locate him, living in Dublin, with the help of the Red Cross. Unfortunately, he was disinterested in her and emotionally distant, and the reunion was deeply disappointing. Regardless, Hepburn took care of him financially for the rest of his life.
Following her father’s abandonment in 1935, her mother decided to move with Audrey to the Netherlands to be near her family. Audrey's teen brothers were sent to the Hague to live with relatives.
At this time, her mother was still dabbling in fascism and was a Nazi sympathizer. This soon changed as the war got underway. Hepburn’s uncle was arrested and executed by the Nazis, having been targeted due to his prominent status in their occupied hometown of Arnhem.
Later, one of her brothers was deported by the Nazis and sent to a German labor camp. Her other brother went into hiding to avoid the same fate. Baroness van Heemstra saw her family members disappear and lose all of their material wealth, which quickly changed her sympathies to the side of the Resistance.
In fact, they were! "We did what we could for the Resistance. I carried messages for them hidden in my ballet shoes," Hepburn once said. She also gave dance performances to raise money for the cause.
During the harshest periods of the five-year occupation, Hepburn and her family would spend weeks at a time in cellars to shelter from the bombing, surviving without light or heat. There was almost no food left and they lived on what they could find—scraps of bread or potato.
Hepburn recalled that they became so desperate for food that they would sneak out into the fields and pull up turnips, potatoes, and even tulip bulbs to eat.
These childhood experiences of suffering and starvation fueled Hepburn’s passion for philanthropy later in life. She herself had been supported by UNICEF during the war, and when she became successful, she focused her efforts on giving back.
Hepburn became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF in 1989 and made more than 50 trips around the world, often to dangerous locations, to raise global awareness about some of the most vulnerable children in the world. This gave her deep fulfillment, and some even say that she ignored the symptoms of the illness that would take her life to carry on her work.
Before the war, while the family was still living in England, Hepburn discovered a love for dance and started studying ballet while she was at boarding school there. Her dream was to become a ballerina, and she showed a great deal of promise.
However, when her mother chose to relocate the family to the Netherlands before World War II, it would prove to be a fatal setback for Hepburn’s dream career.
She suffered from anemia, jaundice, and respiratory infections. In 1945, her mother reportedly became so desperate that she wrote to an ex-lover who was a British military officer for help. He mailed her thousands of cigarettes to sell on the black market so she could buy penicillin to save her daughter.
Baroness van Heemstra began working as a housekeep and cook to support herself and her daughter after the war. Hepburn continued to study ballet in the Netherlands at this point, now 16 years old, and eventually moved to London after a few years to pursue her career.
Sadly, Hepburn’s growth had been disrupted by starvation and she was told that she didn’t have the physique or the strength to become a prima ballerina. It was then that she decided to focus on acting and modeling instead.
She made her debut as a chorus girl in a London musical in 1948, and in 1951 she landed her breakthrough role as the star in the Broadway production of ‘Gigi.’ She was just 22 years old and off to the US to start a career that would become one of the most impressive in entertainment history.
By 1953, Hepburn had earned her first Oscar for her starring role in the film ‘A Roman Holiday’ opposite Gregory Peck.
In 1954, Hepburn won a Tony for her performance in the Broadway show ‘Ondine.’ This is where she met Mel Ferrer, an actor she went on to marry later that year. By all accounts, Ferrer was a controlling and domineering husband, and their marriage was unhappy.
They had one child together, a son named Sean, in 1960. Hepburn adored children and wanted to have many of them, but, sadly, she suffered several miscarriages throughout the 1960s. One reportedly occurred after she fell from a horse during filming. She and Ferrer divorced in 1968.
In 1969, Hepburn married an Italian psychiatrist named Andrea Dotti. They had one more child together, a son named Luca. Unfortunately, this marriage wasn’t particularly happy either. Dotti was prolifically and openly unfaithful.
A filmmaker named Helena Coan made a 2020 documentary about Hepburn called ‘Audrey,’ and having spent hundreds of hours reviewing archival footage and photos, she estimates that Dotti was photographed with at least 200 different women while married to Hepburn.
Hepburn’s petite frame may have been coveted as her fame grew, but when she was starting out, Marilyn Monroe types were the ideal of beauty, and Hepburn was neither blonde nor curvaceous. She hated how she looked.
In 1992, President George H. W. Bush awarded Hepburn the Presidential Medal of Freedom in honor of her years of dedicated work with UNICEF. However, she was too sick to attend the ceremony.
Hepburn had started to develop abdominal pain that year, and tests revealed that she had a rare form of cancer in her abdomen. Despite surgery and chemotherapy, she did not recover.
Hepburn had been receiving treatment in Los Angeles and desperately wanted to return home to Switzerland, where she had lived much of her life, to spend one last Christmas with her children and partner, Robert Wolders (pictured). They had been together for over a decade and, although they never married, he seemed to be the loving partner that Hepburn had been deprived of for so much of her life.
Hepburn's condition was too fragile for her to take a commercial flight, so her longtime friend and creative collaborator, fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy, organized a private jet filled with flowers to take her home. She spent Christmas with her family and passed away on January 20, 1993. She was 63 years old.
Sources: (The Guardian) (Harper's Bazaar) (Stacker) (People)
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Audrey Hepburn passed away some three decades ago, but she’s still remembered as the epitome of grace and beauty. But despite all we know about her illustrious acting career and philanthropy, there’s so much we don’t know about Hollywood’s greatest fashion icon. One of her grandchildren was quoted as saying, “The best-kept secret about Audrey was that she was sad.”
Behind the charm and impeccable style was a woman who had suffered many traumas early in life. Her broken family barely survived World War II, and Hepburn never fully recovered, either emotionally or physically.
Intrigued? Click through the following gallery to learn all about the pain behind her perfect image, and find out just how resilient she really was.