The sad story of a haunted, fragile star
It’s a biographical cliché to go hunting for sadness in celebrities’ lives, especially female ones. But you don’t have to dig very hard to find it in the story of Audrey Hepburn, twice divorced, professionally restless, and a star in flight from her own fame. Hers was an unsettled existence. The child of divorced Dutch aristocrats who were fascist sympathisers, she grew up in Nazi-occupied Holland, where her uncles were among the first prisoners to be shot by the SS. Sleeping on a cellar mattress, she would volunteer for the Resistance to help Jews in hiding – a fact mentioned briefly in Audrey, an absorbing new documentary from Helena Coan.
Some 15 years after the war, Hepburn would decline the role of Anne Frank as too close to home, and later rejected a part in A Bridge Too Far (1977) because she didn’t want to revisit the destruction rained down on her home town, Arnhem.
Not even 50 when that was made, she was hardly acting any more – indeed, she would only make four film appearances in the quartercentury before her death in 1993. Her heyday as one of the screen’s most recognisable icons was a candle in the wind compared with a Streep or a Deneuve. She rocketed to overnight fame and a Best Actress Oscar at just 24, when William Wyler cast her as the gamine, tomboyish princess in Roman Holiday (1953). Hollywood fell headlong, and, for a while, she graciously reciprocated.
Here was a new kind of star, whose demure comportment made her more of a rival to Grace Kelly than the sultry wattage of a Taylor or Monroe. Insecure in her screen charisma, she had a childhood aptitude for dancing to fall back on – a godsend opposite the intimidating Fred Astaire in Funny Face (1957). Coan glances at this side of her talent by casting three ballerinas, including Cats’ Francesca Hayward, to represent Hepburn at morning, noon and night.
More than pliés, she banked on the clothes. Audrey skimps on her relationships with directors and male stars, only a couple of whom (Richard Dreyfuss, Peter Bogdanovich) feature in its interviews with surviving near-and-dear. But it does discuss her intimate friendship with Hubert de Givenchy, who would define her in dresses, starting with the famous floral-patterned gown in Sabrina (1954). Her reputation for steely career management took a knock when Jack Warner overdubbed her singing in My Fair Lady (1964), compounding the bad press after casting her instead of Julie Andrews. There was nothing she could do. “Anxious and fragile,” according to Bogdanovich, she plotted her escape.
Hepburn’s first marriage, with War and Peace co-star Mel Ferrer, had run its course after 14 years. She moved to Rome with the Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, but his unstoppable adultery left lingering scars, as did the pain of numerous miscarriages. “She was suffering a lot,” says a friend, Anna Cataldi. Her granddaughter, the artist Emma Kathleen Ferrer, remembers something her father told her about these years of lovelessness and loneliness, before she eventually found a match in the Dutch actor Robbie Wolders: “The best kept secret about Audrey was that she was sad.”
Beneath the radiance, this makes sense, and hardly feels like a secret when you study the photographs. Admittedly, I used to find Hepburn’s dazzling catwalk poise an obstacle to being moved by her. I like her most for her great, glammed-down performance in The Nun’s Story (1959), and her touching, stricken work (and final Oscar nod) as the blind heroine of Wait Until Dark (1967).
Audrey leaves you itching to read a meaty biography, even as it solidly maps out Hepburn’s emotional life, and explains the relationship with trauma that cut her out so well to be a Unicef ambassador, raising millions for Bosnian war orphans and Somalian famine relief. As a style icon, she left an immortal, luminous, if brittle legacy. Her deeper calling, Audrey argues, was as a regal champion of the dispossessed.
Available on DVD and to download digitally from Amazon, itunes and others from today