‘If I could just have seen him regularly, I would have felt he loved me’
How Audrey Hepburn’s search for the father who had abandoned her brought her to Dublin
SEVENTY years ago, Audrey Hepburn’s film Roman Holiday transformed her from a relative unknown to an overnight star. The boyish ex-ballerina, who had been forced to relinquish her ambition to be a dancer due to her height, achieved instant stardom aged only 22. Poised and fresh-faced she captured the public’s imagination with her portrayal of a princess who plays truant for 24 hours in Rome with a handsome journalist, Gregory Peck and received an Oscar for her Hollywood debut. She also became a fashion icon who influenced women with her sleek, simple style. But behind the glamorous façade and fairytale ascent to stardom was a woman who had experienced abandonment, hardship and hunger as a child.
Today, Audrey is still constantly cited as a fashion icon and one of the most stylish stars of the silver screen. This week auction house Christie’s in Geneva were due to auction the pearl, diamond and sapphire necklace Hepburn wore in the final scene of Roman Holiday but at the last moment stated ‘We can confirm that lot 234 from the sale ‘Jewels Online: The Geneva Edit’ closing on November 16 has been withdrawn from sale.’ Although a registered bid had exceeded the estimate at $31,534, (€28,900), perhaps the consignee had higher expectations.
In the past Hepburn items have sold for exceptional sums: in 2017 in London, a 10-hour live auction realised £4,635,500 (€5,301,718) — a figure over seven times the original estimate for the star’s belongings. This necklace while not a personal possession, had provenance being worn in Audrey’s breakthrough performance in Roman Holiday. Always a fan of pearls she wore them throughout her life, and they epitomised her understated chic. The striking multi-strand Furst collar symbolised her return to royal life at the movie’s end and accentuated her long regal neck which was one of her defining features.
Audrey did have aristocratic pedigree in real life on her mother’s side, but it had not shielded her from a traumatic childhood. While of mixed British and Dutch heritage, she also had a notable link to Ireland: her father lived here after the Second World War until his death aged 92 in 1981. He had left the family home when Audrey was only six and after the war she did not see him again until she tracked him to Dublin decades later. He was Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston, a British subject born in AustriaHungary in 1889. His maternal great grandmother’s name was Hepburn.
From 1923–1924, Joseph was an Honorary British Consul in Semarang in the Dutch East Indies and prior to his marriage to Hepburn’s mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, was married to Cornelia Bisschop, a Dutch heiress. Although born with the surname Ruston, he later adopted the more ‘aristocratic’ Hepburn-Ruston, as he believed himself descended from James Hepburn, husband of Mary Queen of Scots. He was enchanted with his second wife, Ella’s aristocratic title and wealth, while she, a young divorcée with two sons, was charmed by his dashing appearance and polished manner. He spoke multiple languages, was highly educated and an excellent horseman.
She also hoped he would be a father to her sons. They married in September 1926, but the marriage was not a happy one due to Joseph’s spendthrift tendencies and disdain for work.
When Joseph was offered a job in Belgium in 1929, they moved to Brussels where Audrey was born in May that year. Audrey’s birth was registered with the British Vice Consul in Brussels because of her father’s lineage, and she carried a British passport all her life. She adored Joseph but from the off he was indifferent to his small daughter despite her fervent attempts to win his approval. He was a reserved character, and his Victorian upbringing would not have encouraged displays of affection.
Audrey was a bright, funny little girl who craved love, but her mother
I MYSELF WAS BORN FOR AN ENORMOUS NEED FOR AFFECTION
too was stoic. While she loved her daughter deeply, she was quite undemonstrative. A sensitive child, Audrey sensed the unhappiness in her parent’s marriage and was reduced to tears by the coldness between them.
The external world was also challenging: the crash of 1929 had led to the rise of the far-right Nationalist Socialists and by 1934 there were fascists in almost all government agencies in Belgium. Audrey’s parents were originally supporters of the movement, and in 1935 were collecting funds and recruiting for the British Union of Fascists (BUF) led by Oswald Mosely. The couple even lunched with Hitler in Munich before the war, with three of the Mitford sisters.
Joseph’s distant demeanour affected Audrey making her quiet too. She said as an adult, ‘I myself was born with an enormous need for affection and a terrible need to give it.’ Any vestige of domesticity broke down abruptly in 1935 when Joseph left the family home without warning. There were stories that he had squandered all Ella’s money. Audrey as an adult recalled, ‘I worshipped my father. Having him cut off from me was terribly awful. Leaving us my father left us insecure – perhaps for life.’ Another time she said that it was the ‘most traumatic event in my life’ and that ‘the ground had gone out from under me’. She recalled crying for days and days.
She loved Ella but admitted, ‘My mother had great love, but she was not always able to show it… of necessity my mother became a father too.’ After the departure Audrey had very limited contact with Joseph and was scarred emotionally. She said she ‘always felt very insecure about affection – and terribly grateful for it’. Her father’s abandonment cast a shadow over her adult relationships, and she always lived in fear of being left, despite her beauty and stardom.
After Joseph’s exit, Ella and Audrey went to live with Ellas’s parents in Arnhem in Holland. By the time the separation papers arrived Joseph had gone to London. He requested visiting rights for Audrey and Ella agreed as she had placed Audrey in boarding school in England. For the four years that Audrey was a boarder in Kent from 1935 to 1939 however, her father only came to see her a few times. She recalled, ‘If I could just have seen him regularly, I would have felt he loved me. I would have felt I had a father.’ However, the school did introduce her to ballet which she adored. On the outbreak of the Second World War, Jospeh put Audrey on a plane to Holland believing she would be
safer in a neutral country. For Audrey this would be the last time she would see her father for twenty years.
Joseph because of his links to the BUF was among hundreds of British Fascists who were shipped off under house arrest to the Isle of Man. The arrest marked the dissolution of his meagre contact with Audrey. It was later claimed by David Turner a historian, that Joseph’s presence in England was to liaise with an old school friend, Arthur Tester who channelled Nazi propaganda from Germany to Mosely HQ in England. By 1937 Ella’s own connection with the British Union of Fascists had ended and she regretted her involvement with both them and Hitler.
Once the Nazis invaded Holland, Audrey’s life changed abruptly. The Van Heemstra family wealth was confiscated and as an English citizen Audrey was vulnerable. Her mother enrolled her in school with a Dutch name (Edda van Heemstra) between 1939 and 1947 and they lived with constant anxiety. Strict rationing was widespread and the Dutch population experienced hunger, disease and poverty as a TB epidemic raged in 1943. Audrey witnessed the deportation of Jewish people from 1942, and her own brother Ian, a member of the Dutch resistance, was forcibly sent to work in German munitions. Her other brother Alix disappeared in 1941 and remained in hiding for the conflict. One of her favourite uncles was shot in reprisal by the Nazis and she described herself as knowing ‘the cold clutch of human terror’ throughout her early teens.
Audrey’s one joy during this time was ballet. She studied under Sonia Gaskell and poured her heart and soul into her dancing. She performed in dance recitals to raise money for the resistance and on a couple of occasions smuggled messages for them. But the austerity created by the war weakened her health. The winter of 1944 was one of the coldest in European history and due to the Battle of Arnhem she and 90,000 others were evacuated from the city. Ella and Audrey went to her grandfather’s country house in Velp, but it was no rural idyll as they went without food, heat, or light in the dead of winter. Often they had nothing to eat but tulip bulbs and by Christmas Eve even those were gone. Audrey suffered from malnourishment, oedema and jaundice, and her mother feared she might die from hepatitis. She weighed only 90 pounds.
Audrey recalled later, ‘We kept going with one slice of bread a day per person made from grass and with a cup of watery broth made from one potato. If you went on you might live — and if you lived you weren’t dead.’ On May 4, 1945, Audrey’s birthday, they were liberated by English soldiers who gave Audrey cigarettes and chocolate. She became a beneficiary of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration who brought food and medical supplies to the Dutch. This organisation subsequently became the United Nations Childrens Fund, a body that Audrey would work for tirelessly in later life as a goodwill ambassador.
After the war Audrey and Ella went to London so Audrey could pursue her ballet dreams. She got a scholarship with Marie Rambert but was told after six months she was too tall and had started serious training too late to make it as prima ballerina. Although bitterly disappointed, Audrey knew she had to find another livelihood and pivoted to work in theatrical reviews combined with some part time modelling. From the off she was noticed and within a couple of years was under contract with a British film studio. As a result, she was sent for audition for the part of Princess Anne in Roman Holiday and was launched into a Hollywood career.
Despite her stardom and the attendant publicity, she had not seen her father since his disappearance during the war. She simply didn’t know what had become of him, believing him dead until her husband Mel Ferrer located him through the Red Cross. He was living in Dublin in a modest flat in Merrion Square with his Irish wife Fidelma Walshe, who was from Piltown, Co. Kilkenny, and had worked as a model in Dublin. They had married on May 25, 1950, in The Church of St Andrews, Dublin, in a Catholic service. Fidelma was three decades younger than her husband. Joseph had followed Audrey’s rise to stardom but had never made contact, perhaps out of pride.
Audrey visited him in Ireland but their reunion in the Shelbourne Hotel proved stilted. Despite Joseph’s lack of paternal warmth, Audrey supported him afterwards with a monthly stipend and wrote to him and Fidelma regularly until his death. Today, some of those letters and cards are on display at the Museum of Style Icons in Newbridge, Co. Kildare. Audrey opens each with ‘Dear Daddy’ and there are echoes of the longing little sixyear-old in that girlish endearment. Audrey’s son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer said she realised afterwards, ‘whether he had been there or not it wouldn’t have made a difference. He was an emotionally scarred man,
HE NEVER WOULD HAVE BEEN THE KIND OF FATHER SHE WANTED
and he never would have been the kind of father she wanted. She made her peace with that.’
Before he passed away in Dublin in 1981, Audrey paid all Joseph’s medical expenses, visiting him in Baggot Street Hospital. For thirtyfive years the father of one of Hollywood’s biggest stars had lived in Dublin under the radar but that was perhaps how Joseph wanted it, especially after his wartime imprisonment. He and Fidelma had been happily married for 30 years when he died. Fidelma later remarried Henry Donnelly and died in 2019 in Elmhurst nursing home, Glasnevin. She is buried in Mount Jerome with Joseph. It is a sad irony that Audrey’s leading men, Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck and Fred Astaire were decades older than her and more like father figures, while Joseph chose as his wife a woman who was so near his daughter’s age. Audrey did not achieve great old age like Joseph, dying from a rare cancer aged only 63 in 1993. She remains one of the iconic luminaries of Hollywood’s Golden Age, yet the one prize which she craved above all, her father’s love, eluded her. It was, however, the vulnerability created by this void which spoke to audiences and made her such a bright star.