Audrey’s decade of love and loss
From failed romance to the joy of being a mother, intimate letters of a film idol
HER rise to Hollywood stardom coincided with a series of personal heartbreaks. Now never- before- seen letters from Audrey Hepburn have given an insight into her most dramatic decade.
The collection of notes written by the star to her acting and elocution coach, actor Sir Felix Aylmer, between 1951 and 1960 are being sold by Bonhams.
They reveal a tumultuous time in her personal life, including the end of her engagement to James Hanson, the young socialite whose later hugely successful career as an international industrialist with his Hanson company earned him a peerage under Margaret Thatcher.
Miss Hepburn also writes of her joy at giving birth to her first child after two miscarriages.
The letters from the Oscarwinner, who died in 1993 aged 63, are being sold by Sir Felix’s family and are expected to fetch up to £4,000 at auction June 29.
Also included in the sale is a 1967 image of the actress in a swimming pool, signed by the photographer, Terry O’Neill, and expected to fetch up to £2,000.
A handwritten signed postcard from Monte Carlo dated 1951 is the earliest note in the collection. Sent while filming Monte Carlo Baby, a 22-year- old Miss Hepburn writes: ‘Would you believe it I’m in Monte Carlo working on the French and English version of a French picture... this place is heavenly, the best thing that’s happened to me.’
Two years later she starred in her breakout movie, Roman Holiday. It was during filming that she broke off her engagement to Hanson, who died in 2004, after he pushed her to marry amid her hectic schedule.
While she was on location in Rome, he was regularly pictured leaving London nightclubs with actresses and socialites.
Reflecting on the break-up in a letter to Sir Felix, Miss Hepburn writes: ‘It is with a heavy heart I am writing to tell you James Hanson and I are no longer engaged. I know there is little I need explain to you, a gentleman of this [acting] profession. For a year I thought it possible to make our combined lives and careers work out... It is all very unhappy making but I am sure it is the only sensible dicision [sic].’
By 1954 Miss Hepburn had found love again with American actor Mel Ferrer, whom she met at a party in London.
In a letter dated May 20 that year, she references her first play with Ferrer, titled Ondine, writing: ‘Mel and I are still working on supernatural but are getting steadily naturally tirder [sic].’
Soon after meeting the actress Ferrer, who was 12 years her senior, divorced his wife and the couple married in private in 1954.
She wrote to Sir Felix inviting him to the ‘secret’ wedding, explaining: ‘How dearly we would love you to be with us on our wedding day, 25 Sept., and how very much it matters to me. Please come... We want to keep it a dark secret in order to have it without the “press”. Lots of love also from Mummy, Audrey.’
In subsequent years she had two miscarriages but the final letter celebrates the birth of her first child, Sean Ferrer.
In the joyous note to Sir Felix, whom the actress considered a father figure and mentor, she writes in a typed letter: ‘Sean is truly a dream and I find it hard to believe he is really ours to keep. I long to show him to you. We all three send all our love.’
The collection also includes two handwritten letters from Miss Hepburn’s mother Ella van Heemstra. In one, composed during the run of Ondine, she writes of her future son-in-law Ferrer: ‘That frog-faced delinquent with the spindly legs has caused sufficient havoc to last a long time and I believe that Audrey is getting rather sick of the neurotic side to him!’
‘It is all very unhappy making’