Audrey Hepburn (4 May 1929 –
20 January 1993) was an iconic Academy Award-winning
actress, fashion model and humanitarian.
Born Audrey Kathleen Ruston in Brussels,
Belgium, she was the only child of John Victor Hepburn-Ruston
, an Anglo-Irish banker, and Baroness Ella van Heemstra,
a Dutch aristocrat descended from French and English
kings. Her father later appended the name Hepburn
to his surname, and her surname became Hepburn-Ruston.
She had two half-brothers, Alexander and Ian Quarles
van Ufford, by her mother's first marriage to a Dutch
nobleman.
Hepburn's reputation was as a humble,
kind and charming person, who lived the philosophy
of putting others before herself. She showed this
side particularly towards the end of her life in her
work for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
She has often been called the most beautiful woman
of all time, most recently in a 2006 poll for New
Woman magazine. She was ranked as the third greatest
female star of all time by the American Film Institute
(AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars.)
Life during World War Two
Hepburn attended private schools in England and the
Netherlands. Her mother was very strict and her father
was more easy-going which led her to prefer him. He
left the family when Audrey was young. She later called
his abandonment the most traumatic moment of her life
(years later she would locate her father and send
him money and write him many letters). After the 1935
divorce of her parents, she was living with her mother
at Arnhem, Netherlands when the German invasion and
occupation of World War II occurred. At that time
she adopted the pseudonym Edda Van Heemstra, modifying
her mother's documents to do so, because an "English-sounding"
name was considered dangerous. This was never her
legal name.
After the landing of the Allied Forces on D-Day, things
grew worse under the German occupiers. During the
Dutch famine over the winter of 1944, brutality increased
and the Nazis confiscated the Dutch people's limited
food and fuel supply for themselves. Without heat
in their homes, or food to eat, people in the Netherlands
starved and froze to death in the streets, particularly
so in Arnhem, which was devastated during Operation
Market Garden. Suffering from malnutrition, Hepburn
developed several health problems. She would stay
in bed and read to take her mind off the hunger, and
she danced ballet for groups of people to collect
money for the underground movement. She resorted to
digging up and eating tulip bulbs to survive the famine.
The impact of these times would shape her life and
values.
Rise to stardom
After the war, Hepburn and her mother moved to London,
where she studied ballet, worked as a model, and in
1951, began acting in films, mostly in minor or supporting
roles as Audrey Hepburn. She got into acting mainly
to make money so that her mother would not have to
work menial jobs to support them. Her first major
performance was in the 1951 film The Secret People,
in which she played a ballet dancer. Audrey had trained
in ballet since childhood and won critical acclaim
for her talent, which she showcased in the film. However,
her teachers had deemed her "too tall" to
be a professional ballet dancer, since, at 5'7",
she was taller than many of the male dancers. She
was chosen to play the lead character in the Broadway
play Gigi that opened on 24 November 1951. She won
a Theatre World Award for her debut performance, and
it had a successful six-month run in New York City.
She was then offered a starring role
opposite Gregory Peck in the Hollywood motion picture,
Roman Holiday. Peck saw her star quality and insisted
she share top billing. For her performance, she won
the 1953 Academy Award for Best Actress. Years later,
when asked by Barbara Walters what her favorite film
was, Hepburn answered without hesitation, Roman Holiday,
because it was the one that made her a star.
After Roman Holiday she filmed Sabrina
with Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, with whom
she had a brief romance. Many believe Holden considered
Audrey to be the love of his life, and she would go
on to appear with him again in the comedy Paris, When
It Sizzles.
In 1954, Audrey went back to the stage
playing the water sprite in Ondine in a performance
with Mel Ferrer, whom she would wed later that year.
For her performance in Ondine, Hepburn was awarded
the Tony Award for Best Actress (1954) which, coming
only six weeks after her academy award for Roman Holiday,
solidified her reputation as both a film and stage
star.
Having become one of Hollywood's most
popular box-office attractions, Audrey Hepburn co-starred
with other major actors such as Fred Astaire in Funny
Face, Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper in Love in the
Afternoon, George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany's,
Cary Grant in the critically acclaimed hit Charade,
Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, Peter O'Toole in How
to Steal a Million, and Sean Connery in Robin and
Marian. Many of these leading men became very close
to her. Rex Harrison called Audrey his favorite leading
lady; Cary Grant said, "all I want for Christmas
is to make another movie with Audrey Hepburn;"
and Gregory Peck became a lifelong friend. Some believe
Bogart and Hepburn did not get along, but this is
untrue. Bogart got along better with Hepburn than
anyone else on set; he later apologized to Billy Wilder
for his behavior.
Hepburn's performance as "Holly
Golightly" in 1961's Breakfast at Tiffany's resulted
in one of the most iconic characters in 20th Century
American cinema.
Hepburn was at the center of a controversy
in 1964 with the filming of My Fair Lady, due to her
casting as Eliza Doolittle instead of then-unknown
Julie Andrews, who had originated the role on Broadway.
The decision not to cast Andrews was made before Hepburn
was cast for the role, and Elizabeth Taylor reportedly
lobbied for the part as well; however, Hepburn was
awarded it by studio heads. Julie Andrews had yet
to make Mary Poppins, which was released within the
same year as My Fair Lady. Audrey recorded singing
vocals for the role, but subsequently discovered a
professional "singing double" Marni Nixon
had overdubbed all of her songs. She is said to have
walked off the set after being told of the dubbing,
returning the next day apologizing for her behavior.
Footage of several songs with Hepburn's original vocals
still exist and have been included in documentaries
and the DVD release of the film, though to date, only
Nixon's renditions have been released on LP and CD.
Some of her original vocals remained in the film,
such as "Just You Wait" and snippets from
"I Could Have Danced All Night".
The controversy over Hepburn's casting
reached its height at the 1964-65 Academy Awards season,
when Hepburn was not nominated for best actress while
Andrews was nominated for Mary Poppins. The media
tried to play up the rivalry between the two actresses
as the ceremony approached, even though both women
denied such bad feelings existed and got along well.
Julie Andrews won "Best Actress" at the
ceremony. Andrews, however, later revealed she thought
her Oscar win was just Hollywood politics.
From 1967 onward, after fifteen highly
successful years in film, Hepburn acted only occasionally.
After her divorce from first husband Mel Ferrer, she
remarried Italian psychiatrist Dr. Andrea Dotti and
had a second son, after a difficult pregnancy that
required near-total bed rest. After her eventual separation
from Dotti, she attempted a comeback, co-starring
with Sean Connery in the period piece Robin and Marian
in 1976, which was moderately successful, but not
up to the usual standards of a Hepburn hit film. Surprisingly,
she turned down the seemingly made-to-order role of
a former ballet dancer in The Turning Point. (Shirley
MacLaine got the part, and the successful film invigorated
her career.) Hepburn made another comeback try in
1979, starring in Sidney Sheldon's Bloodline: Pulp
author Sheldon's books were so popular his name was
included in the film's title, no doubt leading Hepburn
to think she had picked a winner. She hadn't. Among
the reviewers, even Hepburn's admirers-- and there
were still many-- could not recommend the film due
to its hackneyed material.
Hepburn's last starring role in a
film was with her new flame Ben Gazzara in the modern
comedy They All Laughed, a small, hip and breezy picture--
a real departure for Hepburn-- directed by Peter Bogdanovich.
A critical success, the film was overshadowed by the
brutal murder of one of its stars, Bogdanovich's girlfriend,
Dorothy Stratten; the film was released after Stratten's
murder at age 20 and was not a major hit.
Hepburn's last film role, a cameo
appearance, was of an angel in Steven Spielberg's
Always, filmed in 1988. A rare Spielberg fizzle, few
got to enjoy Hepburn looking, indeed, angelic, before
the film was pulled from theaters.
Work for UNICEF
Soon after Hepburn's final film role, she was appointed
a special ambassador to the United Nations Children's
Fund (UNICEF). Grateful for her own good fortune after
being a victim of the Nazi occupation as a child,
she dedicated the remainder of her life to helping
impoverished children in the world's poorest nations.
Though she had done work for UNICEF
in the 50's, this was a much higher dedication. Those
close to her say that the thoughts of dying, helpless
children consumed her for the rest of her life. She
visited countries in Africa and South Asia as part
of UNICEF programs. She dedicated herself to spreading
awareness of the conditions of these nations and doing
what she could to help directly. In one interview,
she mentioned buying camels and solar boxes so medicines
could be delivered to a village in the middle of a
desert. She worked tirelessly for UNICEF and various
causes in Afric a and other South Asian countries,
even in the last months of her life.
In 1992, President George Bush presented
her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition
of her work with UNICEF, and the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences awarded her The Jean Hersholt
Humanitarian Award for her contribution to humanity.
This was awarded posthumously, and her son accepted
the award on her behalf.
She has a star on the Hollywood Walk
of Fame at 1652 Vine Street.
Filmography
Dutch in Seven Lessons (1948) (documentary)
Monte Carlo Baby (1951)
Laughter in Paradise (1951)
One Wild Oat (1951)
The Lavender Hill Mob (1951)
Young Wives' Tale (1951)
The Secret People (1952)
We Will Go to Monte Carlo (1952) (French version of
Monte Carlo Baby)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Sabrina (1954)
War and Peace (1956)
Funny Face (1957)
Love in the Afternoon (1957)
Green Mansions (1959)
The Nun's Story (1959)
The Unforgiven (1960)
Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961)
The Children's Hour (1961)
Charade (1963)
Paris, When It Sizzles (1964)
My Fair Lady (1964)
How to Steal a Million (1966)
Two for the Road (1967)
Wait Until Dark (1967)
Robin and Marian (1976)
Bloodline (1979)
They All Laughed (1981)
Always (1989)
In addition to the above, Hepburn hosted the 1993
television series, Gardens of the World with Audrey
Hepburn for PBS, a nine-episode documentary series
which premiered on the day of her death. She also
appeared in an April 1952 episode of CBS Television
Workshop entitled "Rainy Day at Paradise Junction"
which predates her "official" American debut
in Roman Holiday. According to some biographies, Hepburn
claimed to have made "several" American
and British TV appearances before Roman Holiday, and
a poster for a 1951 British public appearance listed
her as a TV actress, but so far "Rainy Day"
is the only example of this early work to have surfaced;
a copy of this production exists in the Museum of
Radio and Television archives in Beverly Hills, California
and New York City, New York.
Some sources (including the Internet
Movie Database) erroneously state that Hepburn had
a cameo appearance in the 1963 film, A New Kind of
Love, but this was debunked by several reviewers when
the film was released to DVD in 2005.
source from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
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