The Daily Telegraph

‘My mother never saw herself as beautiful’

Twenty-five years after Audrey Hepburn’s death, her son tells Hannah Betts about her hidden insecuriti­es

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Ayoung woman in sunglasses and evening dress chews a croissant while gazing through a window; a necker chiefed princess whizzes around Rome on the back of a moped; a gamine model struts her stuff in beatnik black. The images we have of Audrey Hepburn are so vivid and so ubiquitous that it is difficult to believe 2018 marks 25 years since this great 20th-century icon left us, dying aged 63 of appendix cancer.

To mark this quarter century, on Oct 6 her younger son, Luca Dotti, will come to London from Rome to share memories of his mother at a fundraisin­g dinner at the Royal Lancaster Hotel. Dotti, 48, is the son of Hepburn’s second husband, Andrea Dotti, an Italian psychoanal­yst whose affairs saw the couple separate when their son was 13. Only then did the actress find happiness with Dutch actor and Merle Oberon’s widower, Robert Wolders.

Having spent 20 years as a graphic designer, Dotti is now in the curious position of managing his late mother, a baton handed to him by his brother Sean, son of actor Mel Ferrer. “He asked me to join the circus,” he explains, a role that involves presiding over the Hollywood legend’s commercial interests and substantia­l charitable concerns.

Does Dotti find it curious, the emotional investment so many of us share in his mother? “For a long time, I had difficulty bringing the two parts together – the real Audrey and the fantasy – but, now, I thank you; all of you. You perceived her for what she was and not as someone else. This wasn’t a Kardashian-type celebrity. She was a sincere person – you got what you could see. In many of her movies, she’s not really acting – she is herself – with the exception of

Breakfast at Tiffany’s because Holly was a different type of girl.”

Indeed, Truman Capote’s happy hooker was as far as one could imagine from Hepburn, the impeccable baroness’s daughter, as the author complained at the time (he had favoured Marilyn Monroe for the role). Instead, Hepburn was so stately that the Queen Mother famously declared her “one of us”.

Born in 1929, Hepburn’s early privilege was disrupted by a traumatic wartime in the Netherland­s in which one family member was executed, another sent to a labour camp, and she almost starved. Small wonder her goal became not stardom, but domesticit­y.

As her son recalls: “By the time she had me and my brother, she was in her 30s. She’d had the war, her career, lived all over the world. She wanted a home, a garden, dogs, children. She’d played her part. Her attitude was: ‘I did enough, and now I want to enjoy my family’. Her dream was to be a mother, which she’d wanted all her life.”

As a teenager, however, he found his mother “boring. An impression you get from famous people is that they have some kind of famous way of life. My mother didn’t have one. Whenever friends visited, they would say: ‘Your mother is so normal’. When I was small, I’d think: ‘What do you expect?” I imagined her with a secret life in which she was a superhero with a double identity. I always insisted she should play a villain: my dream

Her own mother called her an ‘ugly duckling’ – she kept that insecurity

was the head of Spectre in 007, with a white cat. But she told me: ‘I saw enough real-life atrocity in the war’.”

He has considered our enduring fascinatio­n with her haunted elfin beauty. “I look at photograph­s, and it’s something I try to answer. She never thought she was beautiful. She didn’t have the uniform beauty of her time. Her own mother made fun of her, calling her the ugly duckling. My grandmothe­r always joked that my mother was this tall, slim, thing without curves – never a sexy beast. And my mother kept that insecurity: the thought that maybe tomorrow would change and she’d be ugly again.”

Style-wise, he finds her appeal more obvious: “When I look back, I see she was very elegant. My mother had an innate charm whether in official photos, or captured by the paparazzi. That is something you cannot buy. But she never worried about wrinkles or getting old because, actually, she was looking forward to it – being at home with her children, her grandchild­ren, out of the limelight.”

Heartbreak­ing, then, that Hepburn should die when Dotti was just 22. But they were close, and had said all they wanted to say, which brings him consolatio­n. On the day itself, Hepburn sent her “small one” to the cinema, to spare him her passing; a poignant refuge considerin­g her romance with the silver screen.

His own children are bewildered by their grandmothe­r’s cultural omnipresen­ce: the first time his son went to a lavatory on his own, it boasted pictures of her. And he won’t allow his daughters, aged eight and six, to grow up with the pressure of being mini Hepburns: “My children are just children. I don’t want them to be constantly compared.”

Hepburn has lived on in her humanitari­an achievemen­ts, continued by her children. Inspired by her wartime experience­s – being among the first recipients of Unicef aid – Hepburn was a tireless ambassador for the charity.

“People think of my mother as slender, fragile, but she was like a train, a force of nature when it came to her charity work. We would beg her to rest, but her attitude was: ‘As long as I am needed, I will go.’ That’s the real motive behind my talk, to spread her message that: ‘Individual­ly we can achieve little, together we can save the world’. There is a magic in her being remembered for who she was. Some people are admired. She is loved.”

 ??  ?? Style icon: revered, and yet Audrey Hepburn was called an ‘ugly duckling’ by her own mother. Below, son Luca Dotti
Style icon: revered, and yet Audrey Hepburn was called an ‘ugly duckling’ by her own mother. Below, son Luca Dotti
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 ??  ?? Family time: Hepburn with Luca, when she wanted to simply be a mother
Family time: Hepburn with Luca, when she wanted to simply be a mother

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