Hepburn was heroine of WWII resistance
Audrey Hepburn is remembered around the world as a style icon beloved for her classic films. A new book detailing her role as a heroine of the Dutch Resistance suggests that we may not have known her as well as we thought.
The actress offered only tantalising glimpses of her war years in interviews before she died in 1993 aged 63. Now a US writer has pieced together the story of how she and her family risked death to harbour a British paratrooper in the Nazioccupied Netherlands in 1944.
Hepburn lived in the village of Velp with her Dutch mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, between 1942 and 1945. The author, Robert Matzen, believes that the paratrooper was placed with the family after the battle of Arnhem by a prominent leader of the Dutch Resistance, Dr Hendrik Visser ’t Hooft.
Hepburn, who had been studying to be a ballerina in Arnhem, started running errands for the doctor as a teenager. In Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, Matzen writes that she began performing as a dancer at secretive events to raise money for the Resistance. In September 1944, after the failure of Operation Market Garden, the Allied assault to secure a route over the Rhine, she was said to have been tasked with delivering food and messages to stranded paratroopers, some of whom the Resistance spirited to safety.
Matzen spoke to surviving neighbours of the actress, who later starred in romantic comedies such as Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and worked with one of her sons. He was not able to discover the identity of the soldier. One escaper, Major Anthony DeaneDrummond, who was captured but escaped by hiding in a cupboard for 11 days, became celebrated in Velp as a wartime Houdini. Matzen writes that Hepburn’s mother sent a bottle of champagne to the cellar where he was being hidden, the night before he was smuggled out, with a note addressed to ‘‘the poor British officer who is so thin’’.