Audrey Hepburn: what the camera saw and what the war left behind

Audrey Hepburn

Photo: Anefo / CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 4, 1929 Brussels, Belgium
Died	January 20, 1993 (63)
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Breakfast at Tiffany's, Roman Holiday, Charade
Awards	Academy Award · Tony Award · BAFTA · Emmy · Grammy · Presidential Medal of Freedom (1992) · Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award (1993, posthumous)

She arrived in Hollywood not from the theatre schools of New York or the B-pictures of London but from a Europe that had just finished burning itself down. The thing that made Audrey Hepburn impossible to place — the slenderness that read as bone structure, the quality of stillness that read as training, the particular vulnerability that read as technique — had none of those explanations. It came from five years of malnutrition in German-occupied Arnhem, where a Dutch baroness’s daughter spent the war with her mother, learning to move carefully because moving too fast cost calories she didn’t have.

Audrey Kathleen Ruston was born in Ixelles, Brussels, in May 1929, the daughter of a British banker-turned-fascist sympathizer and a Dutch noblewoman who would eventually flee with her children to neutral Netherlands as war gathered in Europe. The father abandoned the family when Audrey was six. Her mother’s choice of the Netherlands as refuge turned catastrophic when Germany invaded in May 1940. Hepburn spent her formative years in Arnhem — hungry, frightened, watching. The Dutch famine of 1944 to 1945, the Hongerwinter, left its permanent record on her metabolism and her nervous system alike. Doctors who examined her years later noted that her adult constitution still bore the marks of childhood nutritional deprivation.

After liberation, she studied ballet in Amsterdam with Sonia Gaskell, then moved to London to train with Marie Rambert. Ballet taught her that a body is a controlled instrument, that performance is economy not excess — a theory she carried into acting without revision. When she was deemed too tall for a professional ballet career, she began working as a chorus girl and a model, then landed bit parts in British films. A chance encounter with the French novelist Colette on a Monte Carlo film set led to her Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of Gigi in 1951. The city did not yet know what it was watching.

Hollywood certainly didn’t know what it was watching when William Wyler cast a virtually unknown twenty-three-year-old opposite Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday in 1953. What the camera discovered in that film — a quality of genuineness that overrode everything scripted around it — earned Hepburn the Academy Award for Best Actress in her first American lead role, one of the most singular debuts in Hollywood history. The film introduced a new grammar for female stardom: not the sculpted glamour of the studio system, but something that appeared to require no mediation between the person and the lens.

Sabrina the following year established the other pillar of her screen identity: the transformation narrative, the woman who changes herself and then refuses to be the changed woman anyone expected. The production brought her to Paris, where she met Hubert de Givenchy — the couturier she had gone to see because the film’s original costume designer proved unavailable. Their working relationship, begun almost accidentally, lasted until her death and produced some of the most frequently reproduced images in twentieth-century fashion. The little black dress Holly Golightly wears at the opening of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961 is now a museum object, sold at Christie’s in 2006 for £467,200. The woman wearing it was not playing an archetype; she was playing a survival strategy that happened to read as style.

The peak decade of her career — The Nun’s Story in 1959, Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961, Charade in 1963, My Fair Lady in 1964 — asked her repeatedly to play women caught between the life they were born into and the life they chose. The Nun’s Story required her to dismantle herself methodically, performance by performance, as the film chronicles a woman’s simultaneous spiritual formation and spiritual collapse. It remains her most demanding work, less a star vehicle than a sustained act of self-abnegation. The Academy nominated her; she lost to Simone Signoret for Room at the Top, a result that divided the film community at the time and continues to.

The received narrative of Hepburn’s career elides one significant rupture. When she was cast as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady in 1964 — in the role that Julie Andrews had originated on Broadway — her singing voice was deemed insufficient by the studio and dubbed by Marni Nixon for the majority of the picture. She knew it during production. She said nothing publicly, absorbed it professionally, and delivered a performance that drove the film to a worldwide gross of $72 million. But Andrews’ subsequent Oscar for Mary Poppins that same year, widely understood in Hollywood as a compensatory gesture from the industry, exposed something rarely acknowledged: the system that had built Hepburn by constructing her image as perfectly as it chose had also made decisions about her without her. The camera had always been in charge.

She married the actor and director Mel Ferrer in 1954, with whom she had her son Sean. The marriage ended in 1968. A second marriage, to Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, produced her son Luca but also ended, in 1982. She spent her final years in Tolochenaz, Switzerland, in the company of Robert Wolders.

The last act rewrote the earlier ones. Appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1988, Hepburn traveled to Ethiopia, Somalia, Bangladesh, and Sudan — arriving in camps and villages with the same specificity of attention she had brought to every set. Photographs from those missions show her holding malnourished children with the practiced ease of someone who understood, from the inside, what starvation does to a body. She had been that child. In an interview following her first mission to Ethiopia, she said the work had ‘come full circle’ — offered quietly, to no particular journalist, as an aside. She was diagnosed with a rare abdominal cancer in late 1992 after a UNICEF mission to Somalia and died at her home in Tolochenaz on January 20, 1993. The Emmy and Grammy she received posthumously completed the EGOT she had begun with her Tony and Oscar in 1954 — an accident of timing that accidentally measured the distance between who she had been on screen and everything the war had made of her before any of it.