Chiara Pasqualetti Johnson Audrey Hepburn’s Life in Pictures Our Fair Lady
Contents Introduction 8 A Star is Born (1929–1954) 16 The Golden Years (1954–1960) 56 The Style of a Diva (1960–1983) 132 The Children’s Ambassador (1983–1993) 202 LEFT A close-up of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s PREVIOUS PAGES: LEFT Posing in an outfit by Givenchy for the movie Funny Face RIGHT On the set of Sabrina
At 25, Audrey already had a style that set her apart. This shot highlights her doe eyes, framed by her well-defined eyebrows, short haircut with fringe and her expression – both sweet and sensual at once.
Disarmingly friendly, but strangely aloof. Sophisticated, without the snobbery. Gentle, yet never weak. Audrey Hepburn embodied an irresistible mix of candour and charm right from her debut. With the gait of a princessturned-queen, she gracefully navigated the spotlight of Hollywood while never losing her true identity.
Extraordinary women like Audrey don’t exist by chance, however; nor by a stroke of luck. Behind all her success was a mountain of work, effort and dedication. Though she was born into a wealthy family and raised in a cosmopolitan environment, the hardships of war deprived her of a happy childhood. She dreamed of becoming a dancer but found her way into film, winning two Oscars, three Golden Globes, one Emmy, one Grammy Award, two Tony Awards, three David di Donatello Awards and four BAFTA Film Awards for her unforgettable roles as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Princess Anna in Roman Holiday, and Eliza in My Fair Lady. Distancing herself from extravagance and vulgar celebrity excesses, she would wake up at dawn to review her part. She was never late and never capricious; her behaviour never that of a spoiled diva. ‘I never think of myself as an icon. What is in other people’s minds is not in mine. I just do my thing.’ She was disciplined, cultured and a true professional. At a time when femininity held Marilyn Monroe up as a goddess, Audrey established herself with her petite physique and ballerina posture. Tall, thin, polite, always smiling, she conquered actors’ and directors’ hearts with her doe-eyed gaze and gentle demeanour. ‘Everybody [on set] fell in love with her after five minutes,’ said Billy Wilder, who had directed her in Sabrina. To Audrey, choosing simplicity was not just a matter of style, but a rule for living – made up of cigarette pants, ballerina flats, boat necks, skillfully knotted scarves and a jaunty fringe.
8 Introduction
The elegance she achieved via a process of elimination reflected her true essence – which manifested itself, even more than through her clothes, through her gestures and her gaze. This is why ‘Audrey style’ became a fundamental component in the success of her films.
From the first tiptoe steps of a doe-eyed ballerina, through the horrors of war, to her debut on the Broadway stage. The captivating rise of the young actress starts in the theatres of London, leading all the way to her Oscar for Roman Holiday, the film that brought the revolutionary freshness of ‘Audrey Style’ to the world. When she divorced her first husband, the Dutch Baroness Ella van Heemstra was 24 and had two young children. She was beautiful and heavily courted, and she didn’t wait long to make a new life for herself with a reckless but charming English gentleman, Joseph Victor Ruston, who would later change his surname to Hepburn-Ruston due to the mistaken belief he was a descendent of the Scottish nobleman, James Hepburn. Joseph and Ella met in the East Indies, where she had joined her father – then governor of Dutch Guiana (Suriname) –and wed in Jakarta with a few close friends in attendance. The first cracks in their marriage appeared almost immediately, however, due to Joseph’s indolence and his alarming inability to keep a job. In the end, they decided to leave the colonies and return to Europe, where the baroness’s family would help Joseph to find new employment. Ella was pregnant when they embarked on the long journey back, stopping over in London before moving on to Belgium. Living in Brussels, where Joseph had been working for a few months for an One of the earliest portraits of Audrey, at the age of one.
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A Star is Born (1929–1954)
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With a fringe and a bow on her collar. Arnhem, the Netherlands, 1939, the year that war was declared.
insurance company, the baroness went into labour on 4 May 1929. Their little girl was registered with the British consulate under the name of Audrey Kathleen Ruston, obtaining a British passport, which she would keep for the rest of her life. At the end of the Second World War, with the death of the last descendant of the Ruston family’s maternal line, she changed her surname to Hepburn-Ruston, although she would choose to simply introduce herself as Audrey Hepburn, a name destined to become legendary.
Audrey’s earliest photographs show a composed and cheerful girl, with a mischievous smile lighting up her face. She looks the very portrait of health, even though she had nearly lost her life a few weeks after she entered the world, contracting a form of whooping cough so severe that she stopped breathing. When the newborn turned blue, the terrified nanny begged the baroness to bring in a doctor. Ella limited herself to prayer, and to giving the baby girl a couple of spankings, which miraculously brought her back to life.
Audrey would often relay this story and, at every opportunity, she would give thanks to the second chance that life had given her.
Halsman.PhilippebyphotographedFerrer,MelandHepburnAudrey
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Not long after, it would be Audrey falling in love. The fateful meeting was with the actor Mel Ferrer. With three marriages already behind him, he seduced her with the chivalry of another era. On one of the rare occasions that she did agree to talk about their story, Audrey would declare simply that she met him, she liked him, she loved him. Gregory Peck had introduced them at a party in London for a few close friends, organised for the occasion of Roman Holiday’s opening in English theatres. Mel was 35 and Audrey 12 years younger. American, but of Cuban-Irish origin, and six feet three inches tall, the energetic, brilliant actor immediately won Audrey over with the affinities they quickly discovered between them, revealing a greater similarity than one would assume. Like her, Mel had dreamed of a career as a dancer, but the polio he contracted as a boy had prevented him from continuing. Cultured and a polyglot, he moved between the worlds of film and theatre with ease and was already an established actor, though not exactly a star.
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To revive the simplicity of a shirt, she wore a bow tied in her hair or a coloured belt that complemented her essential, practical style, so as not to restrict her movement. She was a lovely garçonne. She often wore cigarette pants, form-fitting and short, cut just above the ankle, combined with short-sleeved shirts and the round-toed ballerina flats that would be forever identified with her style. Her favourites were by Salvatore Ferragamo, the Italian craftsman who had made a fortune in America, only to return to Italy and open a workshop in Florence. Made to measure for her, they were a round-toed design in suede, almost completely flat to the ground. This was to distract attention from her feet, which the actress considered unattractive, but Ferragamo made them a point of strength instead. ‘Audrey Hepburn’s long, slim foot is in perfect proportion to her height. She is a true artist and a true aristocrat,’ he would write of her in his autobiography. They had met for the first time during the filming of Sabrina, when Ferragamo created pointed shoes for her, with small arched heels – the style would be dubbed ‘Sabrina’ following the success of the film. Since then, Audrey would often be seen at Palazzo Spini Feroni, Ferragamo’s Florentine headquarters, which had then begun working for film sets, soon earning the nickname ‘shoemaker to the stars’.
‘[…] beautiful dresses always seemed like costumes to me. I knew I could carry them off, but they weren’t my attire of choice.’ In portraits taken off-set, her sobriety was never boring.
She didn’t need heels or necklines: her personality was enough, so much so that she was soon attracting attention with her fresh, authentic style even when posing out of the spotlight.
Audrey, more beautiful than ever, was 30 when she acted in The Nun’s Story, released in 1959.
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Although the film was a brilliant romantic comedy, with sophisticated dialogue and full of humour, Audrey was aware that her roles were beginning to get repetitive. In 1957, at the peak of her popularity, she decided to take a year off the movie set, which she spent in the tranquillity of the chalet she had rented in Switzerland, refusing all film offers that came her way. She was not happy: her marriage was going through a crisis, and she was beginning to feel frustrated by the female romantic roles that she so perfectly embodied but that she felt were no longer right for her. The opportunity to test herself with something different arrived precisely at this moment. Three million copies of a novel based on a true story had been sold in bookstores, and it was causing a huge sensation: it was the story of Marie Louise Habets, a nun torn between her religious vocation and the desire to dedicate her life to care for the sick; an inner conflict which culminates in the abandonment of her vows and her new profession as a war nurse. Audrey immediately agreed to play Sister Luke in The Nun’s Story. The role was fated to stir a desire within her to be useful to those most in need, anticipating the commitment she would dedicate to UNICEF many years later. ‘I am like Sister Luke in many ways,’ she said, explaining that, like her, she was born in Belgium, she had lost her father as a child, and her brothers had also been prisoners of war. But, above all, neither of them allowed theirself to be defined by the clothing they wore, whether it be a tunic or a sumptuous stage costume. For this film, Audrey knew she could not count on Givenchy’s beautiful clothes, but only on her face and the hands emerging from the nun’s simple habit. To prepare for a credible performance, she studied her character in every detail for months, visiting convents and handling surgical instruments from the 1930s, the era in which the story was set. She also wished to meet Marie Louise Habets, but was afraid of intruding. When the director arranged the meeting, Audrey approached, intimidated, and listened attentively to the former religious sister, who recounted the details of her life for her, helping her to understand the decisions she made and teaching her to imitate her hand gestures. That first meeting would mark the beginning of a friendship between Audrey and Lou, as close friends called her, linked as they were by an instinctive harmony built of shared values and awareness.
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As she had done in the past, Audrey took on the demanding challenge of a role which placed her in competition with the talent of Julie Andrews.
Diving headlong into studying Eliza Doolittle’s character, Audrey counted on her English origins to move from the Cockney accent spoken by the humble flower girl from the London suburbs to the impeccable tones of an elegant young lady from Mayfair.
Direction was entrusted to George Cukor, and Cary Grant should have been supporting Audrey on the set once again, but he declined the offer. He would be replaced by Rex Harrison, a veteran in the role of Professor Higgins, having played him for years in its original onstage production.
Poster created by artist Bob Peak for the 1964 film My Fair Lady, directed by George Cukor. Audrey’s fame had reached its peak when, on 29 March 1963, she was invited to New York to sing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President’ at a reception held at the Waldorf Astoria for John F. Kennedy’s birthday, as Marilyn Monroe had done the year before. This was but a prelude to a new performance, which would strengthen her career through another memorable film. For the past three years, a hugely successful musical had been staged on Broadway. It was called My Fair Lady, and it starred a talented young actress, the 20-year-old Julie Andrews. Everyone expected Julie to play the leading role in the film interpretation of the comedy, but the studio preferred to focus on stars with wide appeal and entrusted the role to Audrey Hepburn.
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The story reinterprets George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, setting it in London in 1912, where an unflappable academic bets that he can transform a humble common girl into a great lady, and even pass her off as a princess.
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Photographed in Vietnam in 1990, Audrey plays with children in a small village near Hanoi during one of her trips as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador.
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An unparalleled icon of grace and elegance, Audrey Hepburn was the most beloved leading lady in cinema history. This biography retraces the intense, passionate story of her life, with stunning photographs illustrating the timeless style of the legendary star of Roman Holiday, Sabrina, My Fair Lady, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “Elegance is the only beauty that neverAudreyfades.”Hepburn
ISBN: 978-1-78884-191-7 www.accartbooks.com£35.00/$45.009 781788 841917 54500
