Agony of Hepburn over doomed love affair with married film heart-throb
THEY were the darlings of 19 0s Hollywood who started a secret affair when their on-screen chemistry spilled over into the dressing room.
But Audrey Hepburn’s intense romance with married heartthrob William Holden ended when she discovered he couldn’t have children – and she cried like a ‘hurt, bewildered child’.
The Breakfast at Tiffany’s star ‘ended the affair on the spot’ after hearing that Holden’s wife had forced him to have a vasectomy years before, a new book claims. Revealing details of their relationship for the first time in a biography, US author Edward Z Epstein describes Hepburn’s sense of betrayal at the news.
She had repeatedly told Sunset Boulevard star Holden that she wanted three or four children and longed to retire from acting and become a full-time mother.
Mr Epstein writes: ‘Once while chatting brightly about the names of their future children, suddenly an embarrassed smile, tinged with fear, crept into Bill’s face. He told her that the one thing, the only thing they could not have together, was children.
‘He would recall the fixed expression in her eyes; how she stood looking at him like a hurt, bewildered child.’
Holden felt the ‘trusting, simple part of their relationship’ had instantly vanished. In his book – Audrey and Bill – Epstein claims Holden was ‘obsessive’ about meeting Hepburn and the pair fell for each other on the set of the 19 4 romantic comedy Sabrina.
They managed to keep the affair secret for fear of wrecking Hep- burn’s ‘Cinderella image’. Holden and his wife Ardis had an arrangement where she would agree to ignore his infidelities. But she saw Hepburn as a serious threat and demanded that her husband ‘stop seeing that woman’. Weeks later they did – over the issue of children. Hepburn went on to marry twice and had two children. But Holden woul d carry a torch for the ‘love of his life’ until his death in 1981.