Audrey Hepburn's Biography.

She thought she was just a skinny broad' with size 8
feet and a flat chest but the world loved her style.
She invented a look that revolutionised Hollywood's conventional ideas of beauty and influenced generations of women. But behind the great star was a traumatic upbringing she could never quite forget. Geraldine Bedell discovers a new biography that tells the fascinating story of Audrey Hepburn's rise from wartime waif to celebrated actress and style icon.
It is now more than 40 years since the world first caught sight of Audrey Hepburn. In her ballet pumps, turtleneck, cinched shirts, capri pants and gamine haircut, she erupted into the Hollywood of the Fifties, with its sweater girls with
big hair and big bras, overturning conventional ideas of beauty.
Pamela Clarke Keogh, author of Audrey Style, a new book about Hepburn, believes she influenced not just her own generation of women but those that followed. "She seemed to me the woman who had the most enduring style this century, the most relevant to today. And then when I started talking to people who knew her, it became obvious that the style wasn't merely superficial. It was a reflection of her character. Unlike a lot of stylish people, she had depth." Certainly, in 1990, when Hepburn was already in her 60s People magazine listed her as one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world. In 1996, three years after her death, Harpers & Queen conducted a poll to find the most fascinating women of our time, and she was voted number one.
Born Edda Kathleen van Heemstra Hepburn Ruston in Brussels on May 4, 1929, Audrey was the daughter of a Dutch baroness and an Anglo-Irish businessman. Six years later, her father, a Nazi sympathiser, walked out on his wife and daughter - an event Audrey later called the most traumatic of her life. "You look into your mother's face and it's covered with tears, and you're terrified. You say to yourself, 'What's going to happen to me?' The ground has gone out from under you...He really left. He just went out and never came back."
Audrey and her mother moved to Arnhem, where they spent the war years under Nazi occupation. The family was rumoured to be of part-Jewish ancestry and an uncle and a cousin were executed; the family's ancestral home was confiscated and its bank accounts sequestered.
In the winter of 1945, when Audrey was 15, thousands died in Holland from starvation and tuberculosis. Later, she spoke of eating tulip bulbs and of trying to make bread from grass, of having only water to drink, and of going to bed in the afternoons to conserve her strength. Holland was finally liberated on May 4, 1945 - her 16th birthday. Audrey was then 5ft 6in and weighed six and a half stone; she was suffering from anaemia, jaundice, and asthma. It was never entirely clear whether the slightness of her adult frame was a consequence of the malnutrition she suffered during the war. She implied it was; but it seems at least as likely that she learned to be disciplined about food in those years, and that discipline remained with her. (She did become what she called chubby in London shortly after the war, weighing as much as nine stone five, but it seems that she then simply decided on her ideal weight - just under eight stone - and made sure she stayed there).
Her mother, an undemonstrative woman, channelled her affection into ambition for her daughter; a few months after the liberation, she took Audrey to London, sensing that the opportunities would be better there. The idea was that Audrey - who had had ballet lessons throughout the war, dancing at the end in shoes that were worn to shreds - should become a ballerina. Her mother gave manicures, worked in a flower shop and became a landlady of Mayfair lodgings to pay for lessons. In 1948, Audrey was awarded a modest grant to attend Marie Rambert's ballet school. There she started calling herself Audrey Hepburn. After months of training, Marie Rambert took her aside and told her that although she had great technique and could always teach, she didn't have what it takes to become a prima ballerina. Years later, Audrey told her son Sean that she went home that day and wanted to vanish. PAMELA Clarke Keogh believes Audrey's ballet training was crucial to her success as an actress and her emergence as an icon of style. It taught her discipline, and the paramount importance of silhouette. In her look and movements, she sought simplicity and grace but she knew that achieving such effortless-looking perfection took supreme concentration and control.
Audrey acquired a theatrical agent and began a fledgling career as a chorus girl in slight West End musicals, such as High Button Shoes (1948), Sauce Tartare (1949) and Sauce Piquante (1950). In 1951, she was given one line in a British film, Laughter In Paradise. She must have displayed phenomenal screen presence - on the strength of it she was offered a seven-year contract. She declined to sign - sensibly, as it turned out, because, while making her next British movie in Monte Carlo, she was spotted by the French writer Colette, who decided she would be perfect for the leading role in the Broadway version of her novel, Gigi.
Meanwhile, the London office of Paramount called her agent, asking her to test for the part of an innocent European princess who escapes her minders for a night and meets an American newspaperman, Gregory Peck. Both the director, William Wyler (who was to become a lifelong friend), and the executives at Paramount loved the test. The executives cabled their production chief in London: "Exercise the option on this lady. This test is certainly one of the best ever made in Hollywood, New York, or London."
The film was Roman Holiday, which won her an Oscar for Best Actress. She also played Gigi on Broadway and never again had to struggle for work. At that time her influence on the way other women looked also began. "Thanks to their first glimpse of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday," wrote the New York Times, "half a generation of young females stopped stuffing their bras and teetering on stiletto heels." Hepburn (she was asked to change her name to avoid confusion with Katharine Hepburn, but refused) was utterly different from other successful actresses of the time. Less blatantly sexy than blowsy blondes like Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield, she was more mysterious and European than some of the breezy Californian girls or the statuesque stars like Lana Turner or Ava Gardner.
After Roman Holiday, she made, in quick succession, Sabrina with Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, Funny Face with Fred Astaire, and Love In The Afternoon with Gary Cooper. Hubert de Givenchy designed her wardrobe for all these films. She became his muse, and he sealed her reputation as a wearer of simple, elegant, but perfect clothes.
Offscreen, in her leggings, black turtlenecks, white shirts tied at the waist, and with her cropped hair and boyish figure, she was clearly an individual. Billy Wilder, who directed her in Sabrina, said: "This girl, single-handedly, may make bosoms a thing of the past." She herself considered she was "just a skinny broad" with a too-prominent collarbone, uneven teeth, size 10 feet and a flat chest.
Keogh believes Audrey's stylishness was largely innate. "She was born with an eye - she was a kind of artist but she also worked with the greatest photographers, make-up artists and hair stylists of her age, so she had great teachers. I think a lot of it was about her background: putting her best face forwards, even though her father had left and she had two really very challenging marriages. Beauty is almost easy; you're either born with it or not. What's really striking about her is that people warmed to her, whether they knew her for 20 years or met her for 10 minutes on a film set. She was very natural and unaffected. What she most enjoyed was to hang out in her garden with her dogs."
AT THE London premiere of Roman Holiday, in July 1953, Audrey met Mel Ferrer. A Princeton-educated producer, actor and director, Ferrer was tall, confident and charismatic. He was also twice divorced, had four children, was 12 years her senior and had a reputation for being stroppy. They appeared together on Broadway the following spring, and married in September.
Ferrer was not easy to live with. Keogh, who suggests Audrey may subconsciously have been looking for a father-figure, thinks "she may eventually have moved beyond his opinionated manner, or grown tired of trying to placate him". The success of her career in comparison with his probably didn't help either. They had a son, Sean, in 1960 and had hoped to have more (Audrey had four miscarriages). But after 13 years of marriage and a decade of rumours that they were on the point of separation, they divorced in 1967.
But Audrey undoubtedly produced her best work in the years of her marriage to Ferrer. She had an extraordinary run of successes: Breakfast At Tiffany's and The Children's Hour (both 1961) Charade (1963), Paris When It Sizzles and My Fair Lady (1964), How To Steal A Million (1966), Wait Until Dark (1967) and Two For The Road (1967). She was 38 when she divorced, and deeply upset by the failure of her marriage. She responded by making a (slightly) raunchier film than usual, Two For The Road with Albert Finney, in which she wore Mary Quant rather than Givenchy - and by striking up an intense relationship with Finney.
He recalls: "With a woman as sexy as Audrey, you sometimes get to the edge where make-believe and reality are blurred - all that staring into each other's eyes. I won't discuss it more because of the degree of intimacy involved. The time I spent with Audrey was one of the closest I've ever had."
In June 1968, Audrey was invited to cruise the Greek islands with a French family. On board, she met Dr Andrea Dotti, a 30-year-old psychiatrist and professor at the University of Rome. Her friends thought the relationship was a mistake, but in January, six months after they met and six weeks after her divorce from Ferrer was finalised, they married.
Conscious of the part her career had played in the breakdown of her first marriage, Audrey applied herself to being a doctor's wife in Rome. And, for a while, she was happy - especially when, four months into the marriage, she became pregnant. Determined not to lose this baby, Audrey took herself off to her 18th century farmhouse in Switzerland to rest out the remainder of her term. Andrea visited at weekends, but he continued to go out during the week in Rome, and was invariably photographed with some actress or countess on his arm.
Their son Luca was born in 1970 and, for a time, Andrea calmed down. But he never really adjusted to not being a bachelor. While Audrey might have been prepared - unhappily - to overlook his infidelities, she found it impossible to do so when they were splashed all over the newspapers. She put up with it for 11 years, for the sake of her sons, but she was being humiliated.
In 1980, at the home of mutual friends in Beverly Hills, she met Robert Wolders, the man she would come to call "my soulmate", with whom she shared the last, happy, 13 years of her life. Wolders, who was Dutch and had spent the war years less than 10 miles from Arnhem, was then recovering from the death of his wife, Merle Oberon, and Audrey had recently started divorce proceedings.
Together, they spent the next decade mostly at Audrey's farmhouse, La Paisible, in Tolchenaz, high above Lake Geneva. She had bought the house in 1965 and it was beautiful - decorated, as one of her friends said, "as she dressed: low-fat" - with an extensive orchard and gardens. Audrey made a brief appearance as an angel in Steven Spielberg's Always, and presented a television series, Gardens Of The World, for American television. After 1988, however, her main role was as a special ambassador for Unicef. The position meant a lot to her, not least because she had been a recipient of United Nations Relief herself after the war. With Wolders, she made 50 humanitarian trips in five years, although she never stayed away from La Paisible for more than two weeks, because she couldn't bear to leave her dogs. Sean and Luca visited regularly, and always came for Christmas. IN NOVEMBER 1992, back from a harrowing trip to Somalia, she felt exhausted and, thinking she might be suffering from a virulent amoebic infection, went to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for a full check-up. She had cancer. An operation removed it from her appendix and colon, but in a few days, it had spread to her stomach. She refused chemotherapy.
Audrey Hepburn spent her last month at La Paisible with Wolders, Sean and Luca, and died at 7pm on January 20, 1993. She was 63.
She would have been 72 this May; and although it is almost 50 years since the world first saw her in capri pants and ballet flats, she still affects fashion. American sportswear owes an enormous amount to her; while Manolo Blahnik, who recently recreated the Sabrina heel in honour of her, says: "Like it or not, she will be the most important look of the 20th century."