Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn (born May 4, 1929, Brussels, Belgium—died January 20, 1993, Tolochenaz, Switzerland) Belgian-born British actress known for her radiant beauty and style, her ability to project an air of sophistication tempered by a charming innocence, and her tireless efforts to aid children in need.

Her parents were the Dutch baroness Ella Van Heemstra and Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston, who later adopted the more aristocratic surname Hepburn-Ruston, believing himself to be descended from James Hepburn, 4th earl of Bothwell. Although born in Belgium, Audrey had British citizenship through her father and attended school in England as a child. In 1939, however, at the onset of World War II, her mother (Audrey’s father left the family when she was six years old) moved the child to the Netherlands, thinking that neutral country to be safer than England. Throughout World War II, Audrey endured hardships in Nazi-occupied Holland. She still managed to attend school and take ballet lessons, however. During this time her mother temporarily changed Audrey’s name to Edda Van Heemstra, worried that her birth name would reveal her British heritage. After the war, she continued to study ballet in Amsterdam and in London. During her early 20s, she studied acting and worked as a model and dancer. She also began to get some small film roles, credited as Audrey Hepburn.

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While making a film in Monte-Carlo, Hepburn caught the eye of the French novelist Colette, who felt that Hepburn would be ideal for the title role in the stage adaptation of her novel Gigi. Despite her inexperience, Hepburn was cast, earning rave reviews when the play opened on Broadway in 1951. Her next project took her to Rome, where she starred in her first major American film, Roman Holiday (1953). As a young princess who exchanges the burden of royalty for a day of adventure and romance with a reporter (played by Gregory Peck), Hepburn demonstrated her ability to combine a regal bearing with a tomboyish winsomeness that utterly charmed audiences, and she won an Academy Award for best actress.

Hepburn returned to the stage early in 1954 as a water nymph in Ondine, costarring Mel Ferrer, whom she married later that year. She won a Tony Award for her performance, which turned out to be her last on Broadway. She continued to enchant movie audiences, however, in such light romantic comedies as Sabrina (1954; this role provided her first occasion to appear in designs by Hubert de Givenchy, with whose fashions she became identified) and Funny Face (1957), as well as in major dramatic pictures such as War and Peace (1956) and The Nun’s Story (1959).

By the 1960s, Hepburn had outgrown her ingenue image and begun playing more sophisticated and worldly, albeit often still vulnerable, characters, including the effervescent and mysterious Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), an adaptation of Truman Capote’s novella; a chic young widow caught up in a suspenseful Charade (1963), costarring Cary Grant; and a free-spirited woman involved in a difficult marriage in Two for the Road (1967). Her most controversial role was perhaps that of Eliza Doolittle in the motion picture musical My Fair Lady (1964). Although Hepburn gave an admirable performance as the Cockney flower girl who is transformed into an elegant lady, many viewers had trouble accepting Hepburn in a role they felt belonged to Julie Andrews, who had created the part onstage.

After appearing in the thriller Wait Until Dark (1967), Hepburn went into semiretirement. Having divorced Ferrer in 1968, she married a prominent Italian psychiatrist and chose to focus on her family rather than her career. She did not return to acting until 1976, when she costarred in the nostalgic love story Robin and Marian. She appeared in a few more films, and in 1988 she began a new career as a special goodwill ambassador for United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). She devoted herself to humanitarian work, visiting famine-stricken villages in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, until shortly before her death of cancer in 1993. Later that year she posthumously received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

An icon of both fashion and Hollywood, Hepburn was the subject of numerous books and documentaries, the latter of which included Audrey (2020).