From World War II to Hollywood and Beyond, Audrey Hepburn’s Life and Career Revealed

Her Early Years

She was born Audrey Kathleen Ruston on May 4, 1929 in Ixelles, Brussels. Her mother, Baroness Ella Van Heemstra, was of Dutch descent, while her father, Joseph Victor Anthony Hepburn-Ruston, was born in Uzice, Bohemia, and of English and Austrian ancestry. After her parents divorced, Audrey went to London with her mother where she went to a private girls school. Later, when her mother moved back to the Netherlands, she attended private schools. While she vacationed with her mother in Arnhem, Netherlands, Hitler’s army took over the town, having a profound impact on her that would span the rest of her life in a number of different ways.

Audrey’s involvement with the Dutch resistance during World War II — and the extent of it — was a revelation to Robert Matzen. “People don’t appreciate the fact that she was almost killed by bombs and she was almost killed by bullets,” he notes. “And on more than one occasion she was almost captured by the Germans. There were also times that she was close to death from starvation. There was always some poopooing that things weren’t as bad for Audrey’s family, but they were bad. I talked to people in the town she lived in and my understanding is that life and death situations were a constant thing. Past authors have said, ‘Oh, well, she was only 14 or 15, what could she have really done?’ Well, in that war children grew up awfully fast and the resistance relied on children and young people, because the Germans didn’t suspect them — which put Audrey squarely in harm’s way, doing things on behalf of the resistance, running messages, delivering the underground newspaper and dancing to raise money.”

Small, But Significant Actions Taken

Robert continues, “Audrey would call what she did small things, but they were very important, like the family effort to shelter a British paratrooper in their cellar, which she was very proud of. That’s something that had never come to light until her son told me that.”

Elaborates Victoria, “Midwives and children were seen as non-threatening to the Germans; you wouldn’t think they were spies or anything, so they got away with things. Audrey could ride her bike places and the resistance knew that she was unlikely to be questioned in the same way that maybe an adult male — or even a teenage boy — might have been. Sometimes I wonder if that period from such a young age of needing to learn how to survive, to charm or distract to have people look the other way and not be suspicious of her, played a part in this timeless appeal that she had to so many of us.”

Her Parents’ Legacy

Both of Audrey’s parents recruited and collected donations for the British Union of Fascists — her father, in 1935, moving to London where he became more involved with group’s activities, leaving his family behind. While she barely had a relationship with her father, she maintained one with her mother, though the burden was a heavy one. “What both parents had been up to before the war was something that just hurt her,” says Robert. “I would not be surprised if it shortened her life. All the stress of what her parents had been, all of the anger at what they had done, was a tremendous burden for her to carry around all her life. It was no secret her father had been pro-Nazi and had spent the entire war in a British prison, but her mother’s secret was one that Audrey felt the burden of protecting. She didn’t agree with what her father and mother had done, but she had to protect her mother. That was the the way the von Heemstras did things.”

He also points out that when it came to the war, Audrey, an introvert by nature, was more or less a “closed book” because “she was afraid that her mother’s pro-Nazi past would come out. That was one thing. On the other hand, she was raised to never boast about herself; to always give other people the attention and never herself. So that’s another reason she wouldn’t talk about the war, she didn’t want to risk coming off as gloating. You know, ‘I did this in the war; I did that in the war.’ She kept all of these really important things to herself, which is why her son, Luca, was so thrilled with the book, because he finally learned what his mother went through. He said he would have to stop reading and cry regularly because he had no idea.”

Her Dream of Ballet and Dance

From the time she was very young, Audrey was fascinated with the idea of ballet and being a dancer. Following the war, she and her family moved to Amsterdam where she began ballet training, but ultimately it wasn’t a direction her life would take. “Dancing was her first love,” says Victoria. “It’s funny to think about it, but acting was more like her ‘Plan B.’ She danced before the war and a little bit during it, but in secret in underground shows or bunkers where they’d have dark sheets on the windows so that the Germans wouldn’t know that they were gathering. It kind of sounds like a cabaret night; in the middle of the war, anyone who had any sort of talent or ability to be in front of an audience, they would do these kind of grab bag performances. Anything that people could grab onto to find some light and a little bit of joy in an extraordinarily dark moment. She did speak later in life about her memories of being a young child and those performances, and how profound an impact it had. Not only on her, but on everyone in the room and how important these moments of people coming together were. Even though in those performances she was a dancer, I think she did carry that over eventually into her film and theater work and the relationship with the audience.”

Elaborates Robert, “In 1944, food became short and she had to give up dancing because of the effects of malnutrition on the one hand. On the other, the Nazis demanded that she join the Union of Artists, but she refused because good Dutchmen did not do that, as she said herself. She couldn’t perform publicly, and started to perform for the resistance to raise money for them. But by the time the war ended, and she had almost died of starvation, she realized she had lost too much time as a dancer. At the same time, she did go and stuffy with some top ballet teachers in Amsterdam and then London, but she was up against girls who had danced in safety in free countries. So she was behind them, and she had simply gotten too tall. I mean, ballerinas are all of a certain height and a certain weight and build. She was kind of tall and gangly and she no longer fit the mold of a classic ballerina. So she hit the ceiling and went as far as she could by 1947. Then the handwriting was on the wall for her, as she put it.”

Early Steps Into Acting

The family’s fortune lost during the war, Audrey began trying to earn money for them by working as a cook and housekeeper for a wealthy family, though she eventually saw acting as a possible means of generating more income. Her onscreen debut came in an educational travel film called Dutch in Seven Lessons in 1948, which led to some British stage work and a number of small film roles. Her first prominent appearance was in The Secret People (1952), which cast her as a ballerina, thus allowing her to perform her own dance sequences. In 1951 she found herself on Broadway in the title role of Gigi, and two years later starred in Roman Holiday alongside Gregory Peck, winning the Academy Award for Best Actress as a European princess who escapes the reins of royalty and has a wild night out with an American newsman (Gregory).

“Audrey operated on instinct,” says Robert. “She talked about instinct a lot, because she did not have classical training or grow up in the theater. Almost all actors start out on the stage and make the jump to pictures. She did not. She had to act from her first picture by instinct, and it was the same instinct, I believe, that helped her survive the war. She translated that into instinct for playing characters and was very good at it.”

“Even Gigi,” he continues. “She did that by instinct, too. When she was asked to play the part, she said, ‘I can’t go to Broadway. Are you kidding?’ But they said, ‘Yes, you can,’ and she made up her mind to do it. And the response was positive. I mean, the critics said, ‘No, clearly this girl doesn’t know what she’s doing,’ but they loved her.”

The Screen Test That Changed Everything

The producers of Roman Holiday wanted director William Wyler to pursue Elizabeth Taylor for the role of the princess, but Audrey’s screen test blew him away and he was insistent. On top of that, Gregory himself demanded that she be given equal billing with him, recognizing something special in her.

“You can Google Audrey’s Hollywood screen test; it’s on YouTube,” says Victoria. “She’s on camera and you can hear people asking her questions off camera. They ask about the war, her work, rumors of her involvement as a child and it is just phenomenal to watch the way she answers the questions. Obviously it’s an incredibly serious topic; it was a terrifying time for her. For her entire life she felt a very deep connection to Anne Frank and really felt like she never sort of recovered from the war. And yet here you have this girl, barely out of her teens, with an ability to be honest and direct in answering their questions on a very loaded topic, being articulate and graceful. You also kind of notice this bit of deviousness, or this smile, when they’re asking her about the light spy work that she dabbled in, and you just melt watching it. You just realize that this is an example of a woman or an individual who just really lights up on camera. Right from the start, the camera just had this relationship with her. It was just something she was born with.”

Not Fitting the Hollywood Mold

Observes Victoria, “We think of Audrey Hepburn now as being so beautiful and elegant, but she was not considered ‘traditionally’ beautiful or a classic beauty. You think of the Hollywood starlets of the 1950s and the women who had been famous before her, and you want to say Jayne Mansfield and the Marilyn Monroe types. They were curvaceous, big boobs, glamorous, lots of makeup and high heels. That really wasn’t Audrey Hepburn. She had kind of a little boy figure, was kind of tiny and was running around in ballet flats and short hair.”

“While many people might have thought the Jayne Mansfields and Marilyn Monroes of the world were glamorous and iconic and exciting, Audrey was relatable,” Victoria adds. “She wasn’t living in this sort of alternate universe of Hollywood. Somehow she felt more approachable or more attainable.”

The Perfect Timing of ‘Roman Holiday’

Victoria points out that when Roman Holiday reached theaters in 1953, it had followed some pretty brutal history from World War I to the Great Depression and then World War II. “So many countries and so many different cultures were impacted,” she details. “Civilization in so many ways was brought to its knees, and here you have this actress on screen who is humble and sweet and kind. And think about the story of Roman Holiday: It’s about a princess — we never know what country she’s from, and it doesn’t matter — who has this opportunity for a taste of freedom with this American journalist. But at the end, she sticks to her duty; she doesn’t abandon her royal calling and fly off with him. I think that really spoke to a sense of patriotism and honor and doing the right thing. It was just something the audience was really looking for in that particular moment.”

Audrey Hepburn’s Film Career: Short But Sweet

As she would eventually prove, Audrey’s desire to be a Hollywood star was fairly limited. Her credits following Roman Holiday are Sabrina (1954), War and Peace (1956), Funny Face (1957), Green Mansions (1959), The Nun’s Story (1959), The Unforgiven (1960), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), The Children’s Hour (1961), Charade (1963), Paris When It Sizzles (1965), My Fair Lady (1964), How to Steal a Million (1966), Two for the Road (1967) and Wait Until Dark (1967). From there, it would be nine years before she appeared in another film (1976’s Robin and Marion) and three more leading to Bloodline (1979), which was followed by They All Laughed (1981) and Steven Spielberg‘s Always (1989). That was it.

This has much to do with her desire to raise a family with her second husband, Andrea Dotti, following a divorce and several miscarriages. “Her No. 1 priority, aside from appearing in the New York Ballet, was to raise children,” points out Robert. “She suffered miscarriages in the ’50s, but finally carried a baby to term in 1960 with her son, Sean. She made several more pictures, but decided she wanted to devote full time to her son and so she did not look back as she made fewer and fewer pictures.”

While Sean had been born during her marriage to Mel Ferrer, her second son, Luca, was born in 1970 to her and Andrea, to whom she remained married until 1982.

Goodwill Ambassador of UNICEF

During the 1950s, Audrey had narrated a pair of radio programs sponsored by UNICEF to re-tell children’s stories of war. Fast-forward to 1989, and she found herself appointed as a Goodwill Ambassador of UNICEF. A year earlier she engaged in humanitarian missions to Ethiopia, Turkey and South America. Over the next couple of years, she would travel to Central America, Vietnam and Somalia. This, more than anything, seemed to be her life’s calling.

Finding True Meaning in Her Life

Victoria agrees with Richard’s earlier assessment that Audrey’s experiences during World War II absolutely influenced her decision to get involved with UNICEF on such a deep level. “Without question,” she emphasizes. “It was a combination of her memory of being so vulnerable and powerless, and not having food during the war, and being helpless — which is all very personal — and her own desire for a large family. That didn’t quite work out; she did have two boys, one from each of her husbands, but there was also a lot of pain and sorrow from the miscarriages. I think she pretty clearly understood that on some level her work later in life was finding that big family to a certain extent.”

Sadly, that work was cut short. Shortly after returning from Somalia in September of 1992, she began suffering abdominal cramps, which ultimately led to a diagnosis of a rare form of abdominal cancer. On January 20, 1993, at the age of 63, she died as a result of the illness. Robert reflects, “The people close to her had been alarmed by how frail she had become, and her family worried about her going to Somalia in the first place. She addressed the international press about Somalia afterwards, and it took so much out of her. It was the first time that a famine situation, or a war situation, had devastated her like this. She had no reserve left; she said she was running out of gas. I mean, those close to her were not shocked by her death, but the world was, because she was so young.”

“The other thing,” says Victoria, “is that in typical Audrey Hepburn fashion, she wanted very few people to know she was ill and kept that very quiet. In addition to the sorrow and the sadness, the news caught people off guard.”

Audrey Felt a Kinship to Anne Frank

Much as Audrey’s experience during World War II impacted her life in a variety of ways, eventually leading her to UNICEF, she also felt a strong kinship with Anne Frank. “The Anne Frank story, The Diary of a Young Girl,” begins Robert. “Audrey and Anne Frank were six weeks apart in age and lived 60 miles apart in the Netherlands. Another thing Audrey took through her life was survivor’s guilt. That she survived and Anne Frank had not. Another of the serendipitous things that happened is that in 1946, before the Anne Frank diary was published, Audrey read the manuscript, because she happened to be rooming in an apartment building with the editor who was working on it. Audrey was devastated by this story before it ever made it to print. And she kept that with her her whole life, this kinship. She called Anne her a soul sister. But she could not bring herself to really look at this connection with Anne Frank until 1989 when she did this series of readings out of the diary for the benefits for UNICEF. I admire her so much for getting up and doing that; she had a terrible fear of public speaking, but she got up and did that. She read the diary. There are just so many facets to this incredible story.”

Although on some level it seems odd that Audrey would feel survivors guilt over someone she never met. “The Green Police took them both, came and got Anne Frank and her family and took her family away,” Robert concludes. “The Green Police which was the Dutch Nazi police, who wore green uniforms, took Audrey at machine gun point back to Berlin, but Audrey got away. She escaped and ran and hid.  The Frank family did not.”